text: Phonemic vowel length As noted above, only a relatively few of the world's languages make a phonemic distinction between long and short vowels. Examples of such languages include Arabic, Sanskrit, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Scottish Gaelic, Finnish, Hungarian, etc.
  In Latin and Hungarian, some long vowels are analyzed as separate phonemes from short vowels:
  Vowel length contrasts with more than two phonemic levels are rare, and several hypothesized cases of three-level vowel length can be analysed without postulating this typologically unusual configuration. Estonian has three distinctive lengths, but the third is suprasegmental, as it has developed from the allophonic variation caused by now-deleted grammatical markers. For example, half-long 'aa' in saada comes from the agglutination *saa+tta+k */sɑːtˑɑk/ "send (saatta-) +(imperative)", and the overlong 'aa' in saada comes from *saa+dak "get+(infinitive)". As for languages that have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, these include Dinka, Mixe, Yavapai and Wichita. An example from Mixe is  "guava",  "spider",  "knot". In Dinka the longest vowels are three moras long, and so are best analyzed as overlong  etc.
  Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in Kikamba, there is , , ,  "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".
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