not aspirated to or elided; is a sound transitional between and . Before voiced consonants, [ ~ ] is more common in natural and colloquial speech and oratorical pronunciation, [s ~ ] is mostly pronounced in emphatic and slower speech. In the rest of the article, the distinction is ignored and the symbols are used for all alveolar fricatives. Debuccalization of coda In much of Latin America—especially in the Caribbean and in coastal and lowland areas of Central and South America—and in the southern half of Spain, syllable-final is either pronounced as a voiceless glottal fricative, that is commonly voiced to before voiced consonants (debuccalization, also frequently called "aspiration"), or not pronounced at all. In some varieties of Hispanic American Spanish (notably Honduran and Salvadoran Spanish) this may also occur intervocalically within an individual word—as with , which may be pronounced as —or even in initial position. In southeastern Spain (eastern Andalusia, Murcia and part of La Mancha), the distinction between syllables with a now-silent s and those originally without s is preserved by pronouncing the syllables ending in s with (that is, the open/closed syllable contrast has been turned into a tense/lax vowel contrast); this typically affects the vowels , and , but in some areas even and are affected, turning into . For instance, ('all the swans are white'), can be pronounced , or even (Standard Peninsular Spanish: , Latin American Spanish: ) (the sequence is commonly degeminated to a short regardless of the dialect). This vowel contrast is sometimes reinforced by vowel harmony, so that casas 'houses' differs from casa not only by the lack of the final in the former word but also in the quality of both of the vowels. For those areas of southeastern Spain where the deletion of final is complete, and where the distinction between singular and plural of nouns depends entirely on vowel quality, the case has been made to claim that a set of phonemic splits has occurred, resulting in a system with eight vowel phonemes in place of the standard five. [h] is more common in natural and colloquial speech, whereas [s] tends to be pronounced in emphatic and slower speech. In oratorical pronunciation, it depends on the country and speaker; if the Spanish speaker chooses to pronounces all or most of syllable-final [s], it is mostly voiced to [] before voiced consonants. Vowel reduction Although the vowels of