This sound is /ĭŋ/, as in the word 'sing.' Neither the ‘n’ nor the ‘g’ makes their usual sounds in this letter combination. The ‘n’ usually makes the /n/ sound in which the tip of your tongue touches the roof of your mouth in the front, right behind your teeth. But in the letter combination /ĭŋ/, the back of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth in the back and produces a nasal sound as if setting up to make the voiced stop sound /g/. Compare: /n/ in the front and /ŋ/ in the back. When reading this letter combination at a normal rate, we usually end with that nasal, back-of-the-mouth sound, and we don’t say a /g/ at the end. There are some exceptions, like the word ‘finger,’ but not many. Even though this is three letters making two distinct continuous sounds, we want students to recognize it as a single unit. So, as much as possible, try to treat this like a single sound. That means that you’ll hold the /ĭĭĭ/ sound for most of the time and then just end on the /ŋ/ sound: /ĭĭĭŋ/. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents these phonemes with the following symbols: ĭŋ. In the early stages of the curriculum, Once’s instructional content represents these sounds with a symbol that is made by typing ‘shift + g’ in a specialized font. This specialized orthography helps beginning readers (pre-kindergarten students through early elementary grades) learn letter-sound correspondence more quickly. By the middle stages of the curriculum, the specialized orthography is phased out and replaced by letters in a serif font.
