also Krueger 1980, Johanson 2009). Vowels Kazakh has a system of 12 phonemic vowels, 3 of which are diphthongs. The rounding contrast and generally only occur as phonemes in the first syllable of a word, but do occur later allophonically; see the section on harmony below for more information. Moreover, the sound has been included artificially due to the influence of Arabic, Persian and, later, Tatar languages during the Islamic period. According to Vajda, the front/back quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root. Phonetic values are paired with the corresponding character in Kazakh's Cyrillic and current Latin alphabets. Vowel harmony Like almost all Turkic languages, Kazakh has vowel harmony (sometimes called "hard and soft vowels"). That is, syllables containing back vowels can only be followed by ones containing back vowels, and vice versa. Phonologically, i (и), u (у), and iu (ю) may depend on preceding or succeeding vowels, if the vowels are back, these are pronounced , and if the vowels are front, these are pronounced . When not preceded or succeeded by other vowels, the three letters are usually pronounced (except in the case of mi/ми "brain" where they are pronounced as ). Additionally, [ʊw, jʊw, ʉw, jʉw] are delabialized to [əw, jəw, ɪw, jɪw] in non-initial syllables (or not so strongly labialized if there is a labial in the first syllable). Back vowels caused preceding -k-/-к- and -g-/-г- to be pronounced as -q-/-қ- and -ğ-/-ғ- in suffixes, respectively (-ğa/-ға vs. -ge/-ге "dative case suffix"). Stress Most words in Kazakh are stressed in the last syllable, except: When counting objects, numbers are stressed in the first syllable, but stressed in the last syllable in collective numbers suffixed by -eu (bıreu, altau from bır, alty): bir, ekı, üş, tört, bes, alty, jetı, ... one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ... Definite and negative pronouns are stressed in the first syllable: bärıne eşkımge to everyone, to no one Morphology and syntax Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used, for example, due to topicalization. Inflectional and derivational morphology, both verbal and nominal, in Kazakh, exists almost exclusively in the form of agglutinative suffixes. Kazakh is a nominative-accusative, head-final, left-branching, dependent-marking language. Pronouns There are eight personal pronouns in Kazakh: The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns don't.