and are in the process of being phonemicized. While the alternation is still for the most part predictable, it has become contrastive for some aspectual verb stems. Also, loanwords don't undergo the lenition process: akar 'cars' (from Tok Pisin kar). The velar stop is almost always palatalized in the vicinity of the vowel /i/. This holds for its voiced and fricativized allophones as well. Hence: a=vadem-ki [aβaⁿdəmɟi] 'trap', vrli-ki [βɽiʝi] 'cousin'. However, there are a couple of counterexamples, where palatalization doesn't occur even though it would be expected. For instance, in the word [aɣiapki] 'chicken', the velar fricative is not palatalized, even though it is followed by /i/. This might be explained by an earlier form of the word containing the sequence /ai/. In fact, the alternative realization [aɣaiapki] is attested. The voiced stops appear as allophones of voiceless stops (as explained above), but also as phonemes in their own right. They can occur initially, intervocalically as well as after consonants, but not at the end of a syllable. They are usually prenasalized. The voiceless fricative /s/ alternates with [h] in free variation. Speakers tend to associate [s] with the southern and [h] with the northern dialect, respectively. In practice, however, both variants seem to be used by speakers of all dialects, with no change in meaning. Vowels Qaqet has four short vowel phonemes: The close vowels are usually realized as lax [ɪ ʊ]. /i u/ can have allophones of semivowels [j w] when preceding other vowels. The open vowel /a/ undergoes assimilation to adjacent sounds: it is realized as back [ɑ] before [ɣ], but as front [æ] before palatal consonants, as well as front vowels in the next syllable. There is also variation across speakers between [a] and [ɐ]. The phoneme /ə/ is much shorter than the other vowels, especially in the vicinity of sonorants, where it is frequently elided, particularly in rapid speech. The vowel [o] only occurs in recent loanwords, such as botol 'bottle' (from Tok Pisin). Vowel quantity is generally not contrastive in Qaqet, but long vowels do occur as the result of vowel sequences across morpheme boundaries. Sequences of /a/ and a high vowel become long monophthongs: a=ilany [eːlæɲ] 'leg/foot', a=ulan [oːlan] 'eel'. The vowel /i/ generally does not have a long counterpart, but is realized as [eː]: [meː] ~ [miː] 'most'. The short vowel /ə/ does not have a long counterpart. There are a