It continues to be used today at Acwsalcta for Nuxalk language learning, as well as in Nuxalk documents and names. The orthographic variants are summarized below. The notion of syllable is challenged by Nuxalk in that it allows long strings of consonants without any intervening vowel or other sonorant. Salishan languages, and especially Nuxalk, are famous for this. For instance, the following word contains only obstruents:  Other examples are:   There has been some dispute as to how to count the syllables in such words, what, if anything, constitutes the nuclei of those syllables, and if the concept of 'syllable' is even applicable to Nuxalk. However, when recordings are available, the syllable structure can be clearly audible, and speakers have clear conceptions as to how many syllables a word contains. In general, a syllable may be , (where F is a fricative), , or . When C is a stop, CF syllables are always composed of a plain voiceless stop (') plus a fricative ('). For example, ' 'thick' is two syllables, ', with a syllabic fricative, while in ' 'stone', ' 'salt', ' 'crooked', ' 'to see' and ' 'wet' each consonant is a separate syllable. Stop-fricative sequences can also be disyllabic, however, as in ' 'strong' (two syllables, at least in the cited recording) and ' 'rough' (one syllable or two). Syllabification of stop-fricative sequences may therefore be lexicalized or a prosodic tendency. Fricative-fricative sequences also have a tendency toward syllabicity, e.g. with ' 'bad' being one syllable or two, and ' 'seal fat' being two syllables (') or three. Speech rate plays a role, with e.g. ' 'you spat on me' consisting of all syllabic consonants in citation form (') but condensed to stop-fricative syllables ("") at fast conversational speed. This syllabic structure may be compared with that of Miyako. The linguist Hank Nater has postulated the existence of a phonemic contrast between syllabic and non-syllabic sonorants: , spelled "ṃ, ṇ, ḷ".