Consonants Vowels • Vowels are also typically always pronounced as nasalized when after nasal consonants.
Nasal consonants Wapan and other Jukunoid languages are interesting in the development of asymmetrical patterns of nasal and oral consonants in
West Africa. One could posit that voiced oral stops become nasal before nasal vowels, sometimes at the expense of having more nasal than oral vowels, which is typologically odd, or that nasal stops denasalise before oral vowels, which is typologically odd as well. Oral vowels are allowed only in syllables like
ba, mba, nasal vowels in
bã, mã. Historically, however, the consonants nasalized: *mb became **mm before nasal vowels and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution. ==References==