The phoneme is usually lengthened to when it comes before an or , within the same syllable. It is furthermore lengthened in the adjectives "bad", "glad" and "mad"; "family" also sometimes has a long vowel, regardless of whether it is pronounced as two or three syllables. Some speakers and regional varieties also use before , , and/or ; such lengthening may be more irregular than others. Lengthening is prohibited in the past tense of irregular verbs and function words and in modern contractions of polysyllabic words where the was before a consonant followed by a vowel. Lengthening is not stopped by the addition of word-level suffixes.