to the open in Portuguese cognates; compare siete 'seven' and fuerte 'strong' with the Portuguese cognates sete and forte , meaning the same. Each of the five vowels in both stressed and unstressed syllables: Nevertheless, there are some distributional gaps or rarities. For instance, an unstressed close vowel in the final syllable of a word is rare. Because of substratal Quechua, at least some speakers from southern Colombia down through Peru can be analyzed to have only three vowel phonemes , as the close are continually confused with the mid , resulting in pronunciations such as for dulzura ('sweetness'). When Quechua-dominant bilinguals have in their phonemic inventory, they realize them as , which are heard by outsiders as variants of . Both of those features are viewed as strongly non-standard by other speakers. Allophones Phonetic nasalization occurs for vowels occurring between nasal consonants or when preceding a syllable-final nasal, e.g. cinco ('five') and mano ('hand'). Arguably, Eastern Andalusian and Murcian Spanish have ten phonemic vowels, with each of the above vowels paired by a lowered or fronted and lengthened version, e.g. la madre ('the mother') vs. las madres ('the mothers'). However, these are more commonly analyzed as allophones triggered by an underlying that is subsequently deleted. Exact number of allophones There is no agreement among scholars on how many vowel allophones Spanish has; an often postulated number is five . Some scholars, however, state that Spanish has eleven allophones: the close and mid vowels have close and open allophones, whereas appears in front , central and back variants. These symbols appear only in the narrowest variant of phonetic transcription; in broader variants, only the symbols are used, and that is the convention adopted in the rest of this article. Tomás Navarro Tomás describes the distribution of said eleven allophones as follows: Close vowels The close allophones appear in open syllables, e.g. in the words libre 'free' and subir 'to raise' The open allophones are phonetically near-close , and appear: In closed syllables, e.g. in the word fin 'end' In both open and closed syllables when in contact with , e.g. in the words rico 'rich' and rubio 'blond' In both open and closed syllables when before , e.g. in the words hijo 'son' and pujó 's/he bid' Mid front vowel The close allophone is phonetically close-mid , and appears: In open syllables, e.g. in the word dedo 'finger' In closed