can be lengthened. The status of as a phoneme is dialectal: in western varieties, it is a full phoneme and there are minimal pairs ( 'hit' and 'eat'); in central and eastern varieties, vowel-initial words take an initial after vowel-final words, preventing the two vowels from falling together, so that the words for 'hand' and 'and' (both underlyingly ) may be pronounced or . The palatal stops and are considered phonemic by some accounts and phonetic by others. For the latter interpretation, their appearance is included in the larger phenomenon of phonetic palatalization. Examples of palatalization include: → → ('a quarter quart (of rum)') → → ('guard') → → ('weak') Voiced stops are implosive whenever in the onset of prominent syllables (especially word-initially) so that ('beat') is pronounced and ('good') as . Before a syllabic , the contrast between alveolar and velar consonants has been historically neutralized with alveolar consonants becoming velar so that the word for 'bottle' is and the word for 'idle' is . Jamaican Patois exhibits two types of vowel harmony; peripheral vowel harmony, wherein only sequences of peripheral vowels (that is, , , and ) can occur within a syllable; and back harmony, wherein and cannot occur within a syllable together (that is, and are allowed but and are not). These two phenomena account for three long vowels and four diphthongs: Sociolinguistic variation Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum (or a linguistic continuum): the variety of the language closest to the lexifier language (the acrolect) cannot be distinguished systematically from intermediate varieties (collectively referred to as the mesolect) or even from the most divergent rural varieties (collectively referred to as the basilect). This situation came about with contact between speakers of a number of Niger–Congo languages and various dialects of English, the latter of which were all perceived as prestigious and the use of which carried socio-economic benefits. The span of a speaker's command of the continuum generally corresponds to social context. Grammar The tense/aspect system of Jamaican Patois is fundamentally unlike that of English. There are no morphologically marked past participles; instead, two different participle words exist: en and a. These are not verbs, but rather invariant particles that cannot stand alone (like the English to be). Their function also differs from those of English. According to Bailey (1966), the progressive category is marked by . Alleyne (1980) claims that marks the progressive and that