central unrounded vowel roughly similar to English "father"; in the middle of a word, a near-open central vowel similar to Received Pronunciation "cup"; or an open front unrounded vowel similar to Received Pronunciation or California English "hat" an open-mid front unrounded vowel similar to General American English "bed" a close front unrounded vowel similar to English "machine" a mid back rounded vowel similar to General American English "soul" or Philippine English "forty" a close back rounded vowel similar to English "flute" Nevertheless, simplification of pairs and is likely to take place, especially in some Tagalog as second language, remote location and working class registers. The four diphthongs are , , , and . Long vowels are not written apart from pedagogical texts, where an acute accent is used: á é í ó ú. The table above shows all the possible realizations for each of the five vowel sounds depending on the speaker's origin or proficiency. The five general vowels are in bold. Consonants Below is a chart of Tagalog consonants. All the stops are unaspirated. The velar nasal occurs in all positions including at the beginning of a word. Loanword variants using these phonemes are italicized inside the angle brackets. between vowels has a tendency to become as in loch, German Bach, whereas in the initial position it has a tendency to become , especially in the Manila dialect. Intervocalic and tend to become , as in Spanish agua, especially in the Manila dialect. and were once allophones, and they still vary grammatically, with initial becoming intervocalic in many words. A glottal stop that occurs in pausa (before a pause) is omitted when it is in the middle of a phrase, especially in the Metro Manila area. The vowel it follows is then lengthened. However, it is preserved in many other dialects. The phoneme is an alveolar rhotic that has a free variation between a trill, a flap and an approximant (). The phoneme may become a consonant cluster in between vowels such as sadyâ . Glottal stop is not indicated. Glottal stops are most likely to occur when: the word starts with a vowel, like aso (dog) the word includes a dash followed by a vowel, like mag-aral (study) the word has two vowels next to each other, like paano (how) the word starts with a prefix followed by a verb that starts with a vowel, like mag-aayos ([will]