Velar nasal in the context of "Languages of the Middle East"

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g., walking rather than walkin), choosing words that are considered more formal, such as father vs. dad or child vs. kid, and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't and y'all.

As with other types of language variation, there tends to be a spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of obviously distinct varieties—numerous registers can be identified, with no clear boundaries between them. Discourse categorization is a complex problem, and even according to the general definition of language variation defined by use rather than user, there are cases where other kinds of language variation, such as regional or age dialect, overlap. Due to this complexity, scholarly consensus has not been reached for the definitions of terms such as register, field, or tenor; different scholars' definitions of these terms often contradict each other.

The Meroitic script consists of two alphasyllabic scripts developed to write the Meroitic language at the beginning of the Meroitic Period (3rd century BC) of the Kingdom of Kush. The two scripts are Meroitic Cursive, derived from Demotic Egyptian, and Meroitic Hieroglyphs, derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Meroitic Cursive is the most widely attested script, constituting ~90% of all inscriptions, and antedates, by a century or more, the earliest surviving Meroitic hieroglyphic inscription. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (ca. 50 BC) described the two scripts in his Bibliotheca historica, Book III (Africa), Chapter 4. The last known Meroitic inscription is the Meroitic Cursive inscription of the Blemmye king, Kharamadoye, from a column in the Temple of Kalabsha (REM 0094), which has recently been re-dated to AD 410/ 450 of the 5th century. Before the Meroitic Period, Egyptian hieroglyphs were used to write Kushite names and lexical items.

Though the Kingdom of Kush ended with the fall of the royal capital of Meroë, use of the language and Cursive script continued for a time after that event. During the 6th century Christianization of Nubia, the Kushite language and Cursive script were replaced by Byzantine Greek, Coptic, and Old Nubian. The Old Nubian script, derived from the Uncial Greek script, added three Meroitic Cursive letters: ⟨ne⟩, ⟨w(a)⟩, and possibly ⟨kh(a)⟩, for Old Nubian [ɲ], [w – u], and [ŋ] respectively. This addition of Meroitic Cursive letters suggests that the development of the Old Nubian script began at least two centuries before its first full attestation in the late 8th century and/or that knowledge of the Kushite language and script was retained until the 8th century.

A voiced retroflex nasal is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɳ⟩.

Like all the retroflex consonants, the IPA symbol is formed by adding a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of ⟨n⟩, the letter used for the corresponding alveolar consonant. It is similar to ⟨ɲ⟩, the letter for the palatal nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the left stem, and to ⟨ŋ⟩, the letter for the velar nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem.

A voiced palatal nasal is a type of consonant used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɲ⟩, a lowercase letter n with a leftward-pointing tail protruding from the bottom of the left stem of the letter. The letter ⟨ɲ⟩ is visually similar to ⟨ɳ⟩, the symbol for the retroflex nasal, which has a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem, and to ⟨ŋ⟩, the symbol for the velar nasal, which has a leftward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of the right stem.

The IPA symbol derives from ⟨n⟩ and ⟨j⟩, ⟨n⟩ for nasality and ⟨j⟩ denoting palatalization. In Spanish and languages whose writing systems are influenced by Spanish orthography, it is represented by the letter ⟨ñ⟩, called eñe ([ˈeɲe]). In French and Italian orthographies the sound is represented by the digraph ⟨gn⟩. Occitan uses the digraph ⟨nh⟩, the source of the same Portuguese digraph called ene-agá (lit. 'en-aitch'), used thereafter by languages whose writing systems are influenced by Portuguese orthography, such as Vietnamese. In Catalan, Hungarian, Aragonese and many African languages, as Swahili or Dinka, the digraph ⟨ny⟩ is used. In Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, the digraph (Nj) is used, and sometimes, for the languages with the Cyrillic script that used to be part of Yugoslavia, uses the (Њњ) Cyrillic ligature that might be part of the official alphabet. In Czech and Slovak, /ɲ/ is represented by letter ⟨ň⟩ whilst Kashubian and Polish use ⟨ń⟩. Latvian and Livonian use ⟨ņ⟩. In Bengali it is represented by the letter ⟨ঞ⟩.