Ng (digraph)
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Ng (lowercase: ng) is a digraph of the Latin alphabet.
It is considered a single letter in many Austronesian languages (Maori, Tagalog, Tongan, Kiribatian, Tuvaluan), Welsh language, to represents velar nasal (IPA: ŋ); and some African languages (Lingala, Bambara) to represent prenasalized ɡ (/n͡g/ or /ⁿg/).
The Finnish language uses the digraph 'ng' to denote the phonemically long velar nasal [ŋː] in contrast to 'nk' [ŋk], which is its "strong" form under consonant gradation, a type of lenition. Weakening /k/ produces an archiphonemic "velar fricative", which, as a velar fricative does not exist in Finnish, is assimilated to the preceding [ŋ], producing [ŋː]. (No /g/ is involved at any point, despite the spelling 'ng'.) The digraph 'ng' is not an independent letter, but it is an exception to the phonetic principle, one of the few in standard Finnish.
In Irish ng is used word-initially as the eclipsis of g and is pronounced [ŋ], e.g. ár ngalar [ɑːɾ ˈŋɑɫəɾ] "our illness" (cf. [ˈgɑɫəɾ]. In this function it is capitalized nG, e.g. i nGaillimh "in Galway".
In Tagalog and other Philippine languages, 'ng' originally represented the sequence [ŋg] during the Spanish era. The velar nasal, [ŋ] was represented in a variety of forms, namely: ñg, ng̃, gñ (as in Sagñay), ng͠, g̃, and simply a tilde over the vowel it followed. During the standardization of Tagalog during the early part of the 20th century, 'ng' came to represent [ŋ] while [ŋg] was written 'ngg'. Furthermore when the genitive marker ng appears on its own it is pronounced [naŋ]; this was done to differentiate it from the adverbial marker nang.
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| The OSI basic Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
| history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
