Dominican Republic. aspiration → carne → is devoiced to [] in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico: cotorra → and realised as a uvular fricative , (uvularization) in rural Puerto Rican dialects Several neutralizations also occur in the syllable coda. The liquids and may neutralize to (Cibaeño Dominican celda/cerda 'cell'/'bristle'), (alma/arma 'soul'/'weapon', comer 'to eat'), or as complete regressive assimilation (pulga/purga 'flea'/'purge'). The deletions and neutralizations (→→→) show variability in their occurrence, even with the same speaker in the same utterance, which implies that nondeleted forms exist in the underlying structure. That is not to say that these dialects are on the path to eliminating coda consonants since such processes have existed for more than four centuries in these dialects. argues that it is the result of speakers acquiring multiple phonological systems with uneven control, like that of second language learners. In Spanish there are geminated consonants in Caribbean Spanish when and in syllabic coda are assimilated to the following consonant. Examples of Cuban Spanish: Morphology As in all American variants of Spanish the third person plural pronoun has supplanted the pronoun . is now completely absent from insular Caribbean Spanish. Contemporary commentators such as the Cuban Esteban Pichardo speak of its survival as late as the 1830s (see López Morales 1970:136‑142) but by the 1870s it appears to have become confined to a small number of speakers from the lowest social strata. In the north west of Venezuela, in the states of Falcon and Zulia, in the north of the Cesar department, in the south of La Guajira department on Colombia's Atlantic coast and the Azurero Peninsula in Panama is still used. The diminutive (ito, ita) takes the form (ico, ica) after : , . BUT . Possibly as a result of the routine elision of word-final , some speakers may use as a plural marker, but generally this tendency is limited to words with singular forms that end in a stressed vowel: ‘coffee’ → ‘coffees’, ‘sofa’ → ‘sofas’. Vocabulary The second-person subject pronouns, tú (or vos in Central America) and usted, are used more frequently than in other varieties of Spanish, contrary to the general Spanish tendency to omit them when meaning is clear from the context (see pro-drop language). Thus, tú estás hablando instead of estás hablando. The tendency is strongest in the island countries and, on the mainland, in Nicaragua, where voseo (rather than the use