A facile method for the synthesis of gallium nitride (GaN) and indium gallium nitride (InGaN) nanoparticles (NPs) has been reported by simple chemical co-precipitation method. The average diameters of the GaN and InGaN NPs were 12 nm and 38 nm respectively. GaN NPs show high crystalline quality with hexagonal structure while InGaN NPs exhibits some cubic inclusion by X-ray diffraction. Room-temperature photoluminescence analysis shows the near-band edge emission at 3.43 eV for GaN and a strong blue emission at 3.0 eV for In04Ga0.6N NPs. The E-2(11) phonon peaks from micro-Raman scattering at 567 cm(-1) for GaN and 564 cm(-1) for InGaN confirms the wurtzite nature of both the NPs. In addition, we have also assigned some other phonon modes of GaN associated with zone boundary K point of the Brillouin zone which is not experimentally observed for their bulk counterparts. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.