# Romance languages: Ñ & Nh



## ronanpoirier

Do the Spanish Ñ and the Portuguese digraph NH have the same sound? I have listened to some Spanish and the Ñ sound sounds different to me. Am I right? Ñ sounds more like the N before _I_ or _unstressed final E_ in Brazilian Portuguese instead of NH, which sounds exactly to me like French and Italian digraph GN.
Thanks in advance everybody!


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## Outsider

Good question. I've wondered about it myself. It has often seemed to me that the Spanish _ñ_ is pronounced with a slight "_y_" at the end of it: _niño = [niñyo]_. The technical term is offglide. Wikipedia seems to mention this in its page on the palatal nasal consonant, but then again according to it the French and the Italian sounds have an offglide, too.


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## ronanpoirier

Thanks Outsider!


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## Qcumber

To me, Spanish ñ, Portuguese nh, French gn, French ni + vowel all sound the same [nj]. 

I think these various spellings only reflect the etymology of the words in which they are used, and in the spelling code of each language. 

For instance French _agneau_ "lamb" is pronounced [a'njo], but comes from Latin _agnus_ in which it was probably pronounced ['ag nus]. Spanish baño ['ba njo] "bath" comes from Latin balneum ['bal neum]. Obviously the unstressed [e] evolved into _ and became the consonant [j] before another vowel, hence [nj] spelt ñ, etc.

When Malay was written in Arabic characters according to a conventional system called Jawi "Javanese", the Arabic letter n with three dots below instead of a single one above was created to represent [nj]. The Dutch Latinized it as nj because J in Dutch stands for [j]. Nowadays, Indonesian uses the digraph ny instead._


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## Brazilian dude

> To me, Spanish ñ, Portuguese nh, French gn, French ni + vowel all sound the same [nj].


To me too, the only thing is that the Italian gn is longer, at least in the standard language.

Brazilian dude


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## demoore

In french we can use "gn" like in Espagne.
But aswell "ni" like in "casanier".
Both prononciation are the same.


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