Many languages have glottalized consonants, made with a glottal stop produced simultaneously with another consonant sound. Another common sound is a back k sound, normally written q, articulated not at the velum, as is English k, but rather in the postvelar or uvular region. Vowel systems also vary considerably. Quite a few American Indian languages have nasalized vowels. Nasalization is represented by a tilde symbol in Chickasaw, for example.
Many languages use unmarked verbs for the third person.
More languages make a grammatically comparable distinction between animate, or living, and inanimate nouns. Alienable possession or ownership is often indicated differently from inalienable possession of items such as kinship terms and body parts. The arrangement of words into sentences also varies from language to language. Many American Indian languages make use of special syntactic patterns to distinguish among third-person participants in a sentence. Switch-reference is the name given to an unusual grammatical device that allows a speaker to specify whether the subject of one clause is the same as or different from that of another clause.