This week we’re just thinking about one sound, and that is /ŋ/, the one which is often represented by the letters ‘ng’. This is our first nasal consonant sound, and because of the spelling pattern, it’s easy to think of it as a cross between the ‘n’ sound and the ‘g’ sound. This can be helpful, but it’s not quite so simple. So, to make the sound, the vocal cords are vibrated and air is pushed through the nose as if you were making the /n/ sound, the tongue is in a different position. So, your lips are slightly open and the front of the mouth is completely relaxed. The tip and blade of your tongue aren’t doing anything, whereas they would be to make /n/ - for /n/ the blade of your tongue is pressing against the alveolar ridge. Instead, the sound comes from further back, and that’s why we’re looking at it this week, because it follows on really nicely from what we were looking at with /g/ and /k/ last week. So, to make /ŋ/ the back of your tongue is in a similar position as it would be at the start of /g/. So, as we said last week, try the back of your tongue against the soft palate /ŋ/, then vibrate your vocal cords and push air through your nose. If you’re not sure whether the air is coming through your nose, because you don’t feel it like a big rush through your nostrils, pinch your nose and you’ll notice the sound stops. Because we’re letting the air come through the nose, the soft palate is lowered for this sound, so you’ll possibly feel the connection here better than you did with the /g/ sound last week, where the air comes through the mouth. Again, you might find the mid-section of your tongue touches the back of the hard palate, too, with this sound I find that less, I often don’t have that connection, but I sometimes do. So, as I said last week, experiment with making the sound further forward, further back with your tongue against that soft palate, and just notice how the sound changes as you do.
So, we’ve still only spoken about how to start the sound. The second part of the sound is very similar to /g/, but rather than releasing the stop, you hold it and, when you do need to release to move on to the next sound, you do so very gently, as you stop vibrating your vocal cords, so you don’t get that plosive /g/ or /k/, because there’s no air coming through any more. It tends to be this final part of the sound which my learners find trickiest: some relax the sound too much, getting a fricative ‘x’ sound, so “sing” would be /sɪŋx/ and others hold and release too quickly, getting a harder /g/ or a devoiced /k/, /sɪŋg/ or /sɪŋk/. Now I should add here that that harder /g/ is found in some British accents, so you will hear both ‘sing’ and ‘sing’ for example – another example of how learning about pronunciation is important for listening, because you have to learn to map both those sound patterns to the same meaning. Finally, there’s a third pattern - we also need to consider the fact that this sound is one which is affected in faster speech, where it is often replaced with /n/, particularly at the ends of words with the ‘ing’ suffix, so “singing” would become “singin’”, like in “Singin’ in the Rain”. This again is a particular feature of some English accents, but will happen to most speakers at some points in faster speech.
Let’s practise some common words with the /ŋ/ sound. To start off, we’re just looking at words where /ŋ/ is at the end of the word, and as you’ll see, they are almost all -ing words.
1. amazing
2. anything
3. boring
4. bring
5. building
6. cooking
7. dancing
8. driving
9. during
10. evening
11. everything
12. exciting
13. feeling
14. interesting
15. long
16. meaning
17. meeting
18. morning
19. nothing
20. painting
21. reading
22. shopping
23. sing
24. spring
25. swimming
26. thing
27. writing
28. young
It’s worth noting that not all words with /ŋ/ have that ‘ng’ spelling: ‘nk’ and ‘nc’ combinations, because the tongue will move back to make that /k/ sound, will also have a /ŋ/, as can words with ‘x’ or ‘q’ where the ‘x’ or ‘q’ is pronounced as a /k/. Let’s look at some examples:
1. anxious
2. distinction
3. drink
4. enquire
5. incapable
6. increase
7. incredible
8. link
9. pink
10. think
11. uncle
12. wink
What I find fascinating about these words is that you’ll probably find your tongue’s always been in that back position for them, and that you had no idea your mouth was being so efficient in not making the /n/ sound. Or, if you’ve always struggled with that ‘nk’ combination because you’ve been trying to do the tongue gymnastics of quickly moving from /n/ to /k/, giving your tongue permission to make the /ŋ/ instead may just unlock it for you!
Now let’s move on to some words where /ŋ/ is in the middle of a word.
- banging
- bringing
- drinking
- flinging
- kangaroo
- language
- singer
- singing
- single
- sinking
- springing
- thinking
Ok, let’s finish with some sentences with a lot of /ŋ/ sounds:
- I was driving long before morning.
- There’s nothing like being young and single!
- We think this morning’s meeting will be incredibly interesting.
- It was an amazing spring evening of cooking, eating, drinking, dancing and singing.
And a song – this is a classic English nursery rhyme, and if you’re an Agatha Christie fan, you may also know the reference to the Miss Marple book “A pocket full of rye”. We’ll sing the first two verses today, as those are the ones which practise the /ŋ/ sound, but there are two more – I’ll put the full text in the script.
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing—
Wasn't that a dainty dish
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.