relations between the various varieties of Gbe. In general, the SIL studies corroborated many of Capo's findings and led to adjustment of some of his more tentative groupings. Phonology Consonants The following phonetic segments are attested in Gbe languages: Notes The apico-postalveolar consonants are generally written and transcribed with the symbols for the corresponding alveolar consonants, except for the voiced stop, which uses the symbol for the voiced retroflex stop . This is only to distinguish it from the lamino-dental voiced stop, and is not to be interpreted as the consonant being subapical. The above table lists the attested phonetic segments. Some of the sounds listed here are in free variation with other sounds (e.g. r and r̃ with l and l̃). The reader is referred to the individual languages for an overview of their phoneme inventory. No Gbe language exhibits all of the above forty-two phonetic segments. According to Capo (1991), all of them have the following twenty-three consonants in common: b, m, t, d, ɖ, n, k, g, kp, gb, ɲ, f, v, s, z, χ, ʁ, r, r̃, l, l̃, y, w. Vowels The following vowels are found in Gbe languages: In general, each Gbe variety makes use of a subset of twelve vowels, seven oral and five nasalised. The vowels are attested in all Gbe languages. Nasalization plays an important role in the vowel inventory: every vowel in the Gbe languages occurs in a non-nasalized and a nasalized form. Capo (1991) observes that the degree of nasality of nasal vowels is less when they occur after nasal consonants than after non-nasal ones. Nasalization in Gbe Capo (1981) has argued that nasalization in Gbe languages should be analyzed phonemically as a feature relevant to vowels and not to consonants. This means that nasal vowels are distinct from oral vowels, while nasal and voiced oral stops are treated as predictable variants. For example, non-syllabic nasal consonants are always followed by a nasal vowel, and syllabic nasal consonants are analyzed as reduced forms of consonant–vowel syllables. This analysis is in line with reconstructions of the proto-Volta–Congo language, for which similar proposals have been made. Tone The Gbe languages are tonal languages. In general, they have three tone levels, High (H), Mid (M), and Low (L), of which the lower two are not phonemically contrastive. Thus, the basic tonemes of Gbe are 'High' and 'Non-High', where the High toneme may