The 15 pre-nasals

A pre-nasal (or pre-nasalised consonant) is a complex sound that begins with a brief nasal followed immediately by the consonant. The result is pronounced in one onset, not two syllables.

So mɓuzi (goat) is not /n-bu-zi/ in three syllables, but /ⁿbu-zi/ in two, with a very brief n before the ɓ. Same for ndrovi (banana) pronounced /ⁿdro-vi/, not /n-dro-vi/.

A quintessential Bantu signature. Once heard, it's obvious — just train your ear.

Beyond their phonetic reality, pre-nasals play a crucial grammatical role: word-initially, the n- is generally the prefix of noun class 9/10, which groups animal names, concrete objects and many loanwords.

That's why so many words start with nd-, nt-, ng-, etc. You'll revisit this system in Module 3.

Disambiguation rule: word-initially in shikomori, it's always a pre-nasal — never an n followed by another consonant as two distinct sounds.

ShiNgazidja has specific combinations barely present elsewhere:

• npb / mpb (very rare) — in words like npbenye (lightning) or npbawa (branch), where pv combines with a nasal prefix.
• nf and nv — in nfi (fish) and nvuu (strength).

In the other dialects these sounds simplify to: f, v.

Final step of the module: three small auxiliary signs — the apostrophe ('), the dieresis (¨), and the legacy circumflex (^) inherited from the 1988 notation.