that depends on how they are counted. For example, long vowels, nasal vowels, and various phonations may or may not be counted separately; indeed, it may sometimes be unclear if phonation belongs to the vowels or the consonants of a language. If such things are ignored and only vowels with dedicated IPA letters ('vowel qualities') are considered, then very few languages have more than ten. The Germanic languages have some of the largest inventories: Standard Danish has 11 to 13 short vowels (), while the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian has been reported to have thirteen long vowels: . The situation can be quite disparate within a same family language: Spanish and French are two closely related Romance languages but Spanish has only five pure vowel qualities, , while classical French has eleven: and four nasal vowels . The Mon–Khmer languages of Southeast Asia also have some large inventories, such as the eleven vowels of Vietnamese: . Wu dialects have the largest inventories of Chinese; the Jinhui dialect of Wu has also been reported to have eleven vowels: ten basic vowels, , plus restricted ; this does not count the seven nasal vowels. One of the most common vowels is ; it is nearly universal for a language to have at least one open vowel, though most dialects of English have an and a —and often an , all open vowels—but no central . Some Tagalog and Cebuano speakers have rather than , and Dhangu Yolngu is described as having , without any peripheral vowels. is also extremely common, though Tehuelche has just the vowels with no close vowels. The third vowel of the Arabic-type three-vowel system, , is considerably less common. A large fraction of the languages of North America happen to have a four-vowel system without : ; Nahuatl and Navajo are examples. In most languages, vowels serve mainly to distinguish separate lexemes, rather than different inflectional forms of the same lexeme as they commonly do in the Semitic languages. For example, while English man becomes men in the plural, moon is a completely different word. Words without vowels In rhotic dialects of English, as in Canada and the United States, there are many words such as bird, learn, girl, church, worst, wyrm, myrrh that some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant . However, others analyze these words instead as having a rhotic vowel, .