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Nasalisation or When to speak through your nose

As many other languages, Gaelic has nasalised vowels.  In linguist-speak that means that you lower your velum while making the vowel sound.

In other words, instead of air passing just through your mouth, some air also escapes through your nose.  It is quite easy to learn how to nasalise vowels - just try to additionally breathe out through your nose.  You can check whether you are doing the right thing both by listening to your own voice and - if you are still unsure - holding your hand under your nose - if you are doing it right, you will be able to feel your breath on the back of your hand.

So when DO you do this in Gaelic?  Unfortunately, there is no simple rule and it also differs vastly from dialect to dialect which words are nasalised or not.  Here are a few pointers though:

1. Nasalisation occurs mostly in the vicinity of nasal consonants m, mh, n and ng.   Now you could argue successfully that due to the articulation process ALL vowels near a nasal are nasalised.  We only talk about nasalised vowels however, if the nasalisation is audible throughout the vowel and fairly noticeable.
   In some cases it is very important to nasalise the appropriate vowels as it affects the meaning of your statements, such as in:

   cha bhi [xa viː] 'will not'	cha mhi [xa vı̃ː] 'I am not'
   a-bhàn [əˈvaːn] 'down' (mainland dialects)	a-mhàin [əˈvãːn] 'only'
   a Dhia! [ə ʝia] 'Oh God!'	a dhiamh [ə ʝĩã] 'yuck!'
   tàbh [t̪aːv] 'fishing net'	tàmh [t̪ãːṽ] 'rest'

   This is not only restricted to the vowel immediately adjacent to the nasal, but can spread through the whole word and even affect consonants, e.g. in màthair [mãːh̃ə̃ɾʲ] 'mother' or seanmhair [ʃɛ̃nɛ̃və̃ɾʲ] 'grandmother'
   
   

2. High mid vowels are never nasalised.  These vowels are [e] [o] and [ɤ].  Thus the following examples are never nasalised:

   [e]	feum, leum, grèim, fhèin, meurag, mèilich
   [o]	mòr, modh, coma, ròn, bròn, tòn
   [ɤ]	coinnich, coinneamh

    

3. Words with a helping vowel tend not to have nasalisation, even if they contain nasals, e.g.

   ainm [ɛnɛm] 'name'

So should you be looking for a bottle of hair conditioner now to dye your hair grey?  Not really, nasalisation in Gaelic for the most part is "optional".  In other words, it won't affect the meaning of a statement or confuse someone your speaking to.  A bit like nasalisation in English really where it does occur but never makes a blind bit of difference to the meaning of what you're saying.

There are languages where it DOES matter ... in Lakhóta (what they speak in Dances with Wolves ... which in Lakhóta incidentally is Šųgmánitu Thą́ka ų Wačhí ... not that you needed to know that) for example the word ú means 'to come' and the word ų́ (with nasalisation) means 'to live'.  In Gaelic on the other hand, whether you say [mãːh̃ə̃ɾʲ] or [maːhəɾʲ], it always means 'mother'.

By the way, this kind of nasalisation has nothing to do with what happens to stops after the definite article in certain dialects (and Irish as a matter of fact).  For this phenomenon read the pages on Nasalisation after the definite article.