Spanish are relatively stable from one dialect to another, the phenomenon of vowel reduction—devoicing or even loss—of unstressed vowels in contact with voiceless consonants, especially , can be observed in the speech of central Mexico (including Mexico City). For example, it can be the case that the words ('pesos [money]'), ('weights'), and ('fish [pl.]') sound nearly the same, as . One may hear ('well (then)') pronounced . Some efforts to explain this vowel reduction link it to the strong influence of Nahuatl and other Native American languages in Mexican Spanish. Pronunciation of j In the 16th century, as the Spanish colonization of the Americas was beginning, the phoneme now represented by the letter j had begun to change its place of articulation from palato-alveolar to palatal and to velar , like German ch in Bach (see History of Spanish and Old Spanish language). In southern Spanish dialects and in those Hispanic American dialects strongly influenced by southern settlers (e.g. Caribbean Spanish), rather than the velar fricative , the sound was backed all the way to , like English h in hope. Glottal is nowadays the standard pronunciation for j in Caribbean dialects (Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican) as well as in mainland Venezuela, in most Colombian dialects excepting Pastuso dialect that belongs to a continuum with Ecuadorian Spanish, much of Central America, southern Mexico, the Canary Islands, Extremadura and western Andalusia in Spain; in the rest of the country, alternates with a "raspy" uvular fricative , sometimes pronounced with a simultaneous voiceless uvular trill. In the rest of the Americas, the velar fricative is prevalent. In Chile, is fronted to (like German ch in ich) when it precedes the front vowels and : , ; in other phonological environments it is pronounced or [h]. For the sake of simplicity, these are given a broad transcription in the rest of the article. Word-final -n In standard European Spanish, as well as in many dialects in the Americas (e.g. standard Argentine or Rioplatense, inland Colombian, and Mexican), word-final is, by default (i.e. when followed by a pause or by an initial vowel in the following word), alveolar, like English in pen. When followed by a consonant, it assimilates to that consonant's place of articulation, becoming dental, interdental, palatal, or velar. In some dialects, however, word-final without a following consonant is pronounced as a velar nasal (like the -ng of English long), and