phenomena that replaced /a/, /ie/, and /ue/ with /e/. The only long vowel preserved in its original form was *iː. *o: was replaced by *ue, *eː was merged into *aː and both were rounded and eventually raised to *o, while *uː merged with the diphthong *ui, ultimately rendering *y. By Late Proto-Albanian, all the original Indo-European diphthongs had now leveled, but new diphthongs were absorbed in loans, and were also innovated by breaking phenomena: *ie, *ue and *ui. *ai in Latin words with AE shared the fate of inherited Early Proto-Albanian *ai, becoming *e, while Latin AU similarly shared the fate of inherited *au and became *a. Phonemically nasal vowels emerged in Late Proto-Albanian. First, all vowels standing before nasal consonants were nasalized. The following nasal consonant was then lost in certain morphological contexts, while the vowel remained nasalized, resulting in the emergence of LPA phonemes denoted *â, *ê, *î, and *û. Except in certain Gheg varieties, *ê merged into *â. The traditional view presented by Orel and Desnickaja is that distinctive nasalization was lost by Tosk but retained by Gheg and that this is a taxonomical difference between the two. However this has now been challenged, after Sheper and Gjinari discovered Lab dialects (Lab is a subdialect of Tosk) in the Kurvelesh region that still had distinctive nasal vowels, and Totoni likewise found that the Lab speech of Borsh also still has nasal vowel phonemes. This means that, instead of the traditional view, it is possible that denasalization happened in most Tosk dialects only after the split from Gheg. Slavic *uː appears to still have been back and round when it was loaned into Albanian, but it is after the diphthongization and resulting fronting of the original Early Proto-Albanian *uː to *y was no longer absorbing new *uː segments, as they are, with only three exceptions, reflected as *u. Slavic *o had already become *a in the Slavic languages that contacted Albanian by the time of contact, and was loaned as *a for the most part; as is reflected also in other non-Slavic languages absorbing these words. After /v/, this *a became *o again in two attested cases: kos ("yogurt", from Proto-Slavic *kvasъ) and vorbë ("clay pot"). It was at the end of the LPA period that length became no longer distinctive in Albanian, although many Gheg and some Lab dialects preserved it and/or re-innovated it. Furthermore, by Old