The velar nasal is a fairly common sound cross-linguistically. It is often an allophone of /n/ before a velar sound. In languages such as Mandarin Chinese it may be argued to be a syllable-final allophone of /m/.
It is unusually common for the velar nasal to be prohibited from appearing at the beginning of the word; this is the case in nearly all languages of Eurasia, for example (the Samoyedic languages and languages of southeast Asia are notable exceptions). This evidently is a consequence of the nasal being much rarer as a consonant phoneme than its labial and coronal counterparts: many languages that do have it as a phoneme have developed it from clusters such as /nk/ or /nɡ/ (the latter is the origin of the phoneme in Germanic languages, for instance) that cannot occur word-initially. It is also not unlikely for the sound to be constrained entirely to the syllable-final position (again, see Mandarin).
The dedicated IPA letter <ŋ> is formed as an amalgamation of <n> and <ɡ>. There is also a corresponding capital letter, <Ŋ>; this comes in two allographic forms, the other resembling an <N> with a hook (preferred in Samic languages), the other a larger, descenderless form of the lowercase glyph (preferred in African languages using the letter).
Velar nasals in natlangs
English
| Voiced |
ng |
sing /sɪŋ/
|
|
n(k,g) |
sank /sænk/ [sæŋk]
|
Ancient Greek
| Voiced |
γ(γ,κ,ν,μ,χ) |
ἄγγελος [áŋɡelos]
|
Latin
| Voiced |
g(n) |
magnus /magnus/ [maŋnʊs]
|
Velar nasals in conlangs
Atlantic
| Voiced |
 (ŋ) |
viŋe [vìŋə]
|
Ithkuil
(ŋ)
