Velum

The velum and uvula are side-characters in your pronunciation story. They aren’t the main characters like the lips and the tongue, but the uvula and velum are still important and do make an impact.

What is the Velum? What is the Uvula?

Now the velum and uvula aren’t things you can easily see. The velum or ‘soft palate’ is the soft roof of your mouth closer to the back of your mouth. If you take a finger and feel the roof of your mouth, closer to the front of your mouth is considered the 'hard palate' because it’s hard and rigid. The further back in your mouth you go, the squishier the feel. This is the 'soft palate' or velum. At the very back, you get a tear-drop shaped dangling piece of membrane - that’s the uvula.

Don’t explore too far or you’ll gag yourself though.

Velum Movement

So the soft palate or velum can lift up or remain down. You don’t need to know the muscle names but know that it can either be in Up and Down position.

Velum Function

So the velum can be in Up or Down position. What does that mean for your pronunciation and sounds?

Depending on whether the velum is in the Up or Down position, it dictates where air can flow. Imagine a railway track switch. If the switch forces the track left or right, that’s the direction the train will go. Air coming from the lungs can be forced towards the mouth or towards the nose. Some sounds require air to go through the nose and some sounds require air to go through the mouth.

For most English sounds, the velum lifts up and the path through the nose is sealed off. Air is directed out from your mouth.

If you, as a non-native English speaker, don’t close off the path to the nose, air can escape through the nose and change the resulting sound or make you sound nasal, transforming some mouth sounds into nose sounds.

If you try to make a nose sound but don’t open the nasal passage for air (i.e. the velum is in Down position), then the air is directed out of the mouth and doesn’t sound nasal enough.

Consider the B-sound and M-sound.

What is your lip position like?

Are your vocal cords vibrating?

What is your tongue doing?

You should notice how the mouth position is the same. The lips start closed. The vocal cords vibrate. For the B-sound, the lips open momentarily so the air can escape through the mouth, and you cannot hold the B-sound for several seconds. It's a a sound that you have to repeat over and over if you want to keep saying it.

B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B

On the other hand, for the M-sound, the lips stay closed and the air escapes through nose. It's a sound that you can hold for several seconds. Don’t believe the air is escaping through your nose? Try plugging your nose.

MMMMMMMMMMM

The way you produce sounds like the M-sound, you are allowing air to flow up into your nose. Normally, you lift your velum and close off that route and air has to come out of the mouth.

But there’s several nasal sounds that you MUST lower the velum for - the N-sound, M-sound, and the NG-sound (yes, the NG sound is distinct from the N-sound and isn't just an N sound + a G-sound).

If you start to pay attention more, you can feel the back of your mouth tighten a little - not your throat lower down but higher up in the back of your mouth. That’s the feeling you want.

Congrats!

If you have read this series, you’ve successfully learned all the parts of the mouth and throat involved in speech. We’ll start talking about the different WAYS to make sounds but now you know the different articulators involved.

If you haven’t read my previous blog posts, take a look. I cover all the different parts of the mouth and throat involved in English speech production and it gives you a good sense of some basic fundamentals worth reading.