However, in the word Japanese each of the two ‘a’ vowels has the opposite quality and we say that they alternate – it seems as if the addition of -ese causes a change in the vowels of Japan. This difference is a systematic property of the language and, unlike the examples mentioned in the main introduction, it does not depend on whether we are speaking carefully or not; much of this section is devoted to such phenomena, and we will show how they can be described in terms of processes.