English-language vowel changes before historic r

In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions and so fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions of a word.

Overview

In rhotic dialects, is pronounced in most cases. In General American English (GA), is pronounced as an approximant or in most positions, but after some vowels, it is pronounced as ''r''-coloring. In Scottish English, is traditionally pronounced as a flap or trill , and there are no ''r''-colored vowels.

In non-rhotic dialects like Received Pronunciation (RP), historic is elided at the end of a syllable, and if the preceding vowel is stressed, it undergoes compensatory lengthening or breaking (diphthongization). Thus, words that historically had often have long vowels or centering diphthongs ending in a schwa , or a diphthong followed by a schwa.
* ''earth'': GA , RP
* ''here'': GA , RP
* ''fire'': GA , RP

In most English dialects, there are vowel shifts that affect only vowels before or vowels that were historically followed by . Vowel shifts before historical fall into two categories: mergers and splits. Mergers are more common and so most English dialects have fewer vowel distinctions before historical than in other positions of a word.

In many North American dialects, there are ten or eleven stressed monophthongs; only five or six vowel (rarely seven) contrasts are possible before a preconsonantal and word-final (''beer, bear, burr, bar, bore, bor, boor''). Often, more contrasts exist if appears between vowels of different syllables. In some American dialects and in most native English dialects outside North America, for example, ''mirror'' and ''nearer'' do not rhyme, and some or all of ''marry'', ''merry'', and ''Mary'' are pronounced distinctly. (In North America, those distinctions are most likely to occur in New York City, Philadelphia, some of Eastern New England (including Boston), and in conservative Southern accents.) In many dialects, however, the number of contrasts in that position tends to be reduced, and the tendency seems to be towards further reduction. The difference in how the reductions have been manifested represents one of the greatest sources of cross-dialect variation.

Non-rhotic accents in many cases show mergers in the same positions as rhotic accents even though there is often no phoneme present. That results partly from mergers that occurred before the was lost and partly from later mergers of the centering diphthongs and long vowels that resulted from the loss of .

The phenomenon that occurs in many dialects of the United States is one of tense–lax neutralization in which the normal English distinction between tense and lax vowels is eliminated.

In some cases, the quality of a vowel before is different from the quality of the vowel elsewhere. For example, in some dialects of American English, the quality of the vowel in ''more'' typically does not occur except before , and it is somewhere in between the vowels of ''maw'' and ''mow''. It is similar to the vowel of the latter word but without the glide.

It is important to note, however, that different mergers occur in different dialects. Among United States accents, the Boston, Eastern New England and New York accents have the lowest degree of pre-rhotic merging. Some have observed that rhotic North American accents are more likely to have such merging than non-rhotic accents, but that cannot be said of rhotic British accents like Scottish English, which is firmly rhotic but has many varieties with the same vowel contrasts before as before any other consonant.

Mergers before intervocalic ''R''

Most North American English dialects merge the lax vowels with the tense vowels before and so "marry" and "merry" have the same vowel as "mare," "mirror" has the same vowel as "mere," "forest" has the same vowel as the stressed form of "for," and "hurry" has the same vowel as "stir" as well as that found in the second syllable of "letter". The mergers are typically resisted by non-rhotic North Americans and are largely absent in areas of the United States that are historically largely nonrhotic.

''Hurry''–''furry'' merger

The ''hurry''–''furry'' merger occurs when the vowel before intervocalic is merged with . That is particularly a feature in many dialects of North American English but not New York City English, Mid-Atlantic American English, older Southern American English, some speakers of Eastern New England English, and speakers of Southeastern New England English. Speakers with the merger pronounce ''hurry'' to rhyme with ''furry'' and ''turret'' to rhyme with ''stir it''. To occur, the merger requires the nurse mergers to be in full effect, which is the case outside the British Isles. In Scotland, ''hurry'' is a perfect rhyme of ''furry'' , but there is no merger since the vowel has never developed because of the lack of nurse mergers. That means that , and can all occur before both intervocalic and coda and so ''fur'', ''fern'', and ''fir'' have distinct vowels: .

Dialects in England, Wales, and most others outside North America maintain the distinction between both sounds and so ''hurry'' and ''furry'' do not rhyme. However, in dialects without the foot-strut split, ''hurry'' has an entirely different vowel: (in a number of those dialects, a square-nurse merger is in effect instead).

General American has a three-way merger between the first vowels in ''hurry'' and ''furry'' and the unstressed vowel in ''letters''. In Received Pronunciation, all of them have different sounds (, and , respectively), and some minimal pairs exist between unstressed and , such as ''foreword'' vs. ''forward'' . In General American, they collapse to , but in phonemic transcription, they can still be differentiated as and to facilitate comparisons with other accents. General American also often lacks a proper opposition between and , which makes minimal pairs such as ''unorthodoxy'' and ''an orthodoxy'' variably homophonous as . See the strut–comma merger for more information.

In New Zealand English, there is a consistent contrast between ''hurry'' and ''furry'', but the unstressed is lengthened to (phonetically ) in many positions, particularly in formal or slow speech and especially when it is spelled . Thus, ''boarded'' and ''bordered'' might be distinguished as and , which is homophonous in Australian English as and distinguished in Received Pronunciation as and , based on the length and the rounding of . The shift was caused by a complete phonemic merger of and , a weak vowel merger that was generalized to all environments.

''Mary''–''marry''–''merry'' merger

One notable merger of vowels before is the ''Mary''–''marry''–''merry'' merger, a merging of the vowels (as in the name '' Carrie'' or the word ''marry'') and (as in '' Kerry'' or ''merry'') with the historical (as in '' Cary'' or '' Mary'') whenever they are realized before intervocalic . No contrast exists before a final or preconsonantal , where merged with and with (see nurse mergers) centuries ago. The merger is fairly widespread and is complete or nearly complete in most varieties of North American English, but it is rare in other varieties of English. The following variants are common in North America:
* The full ''Mary''–''marry''–''merry'' merger (also known, in this context, as the three-way merger) is found throughout much of the United States (particularly the Western and Central United States) and in all of Canada except Montreal. This is found in about 57% of American English speakers, according to a 2003 dialect survey.Dialect Survey

* No merger, also known as a three-way contrast, exists in North America primarily in the Northeastern United States and is most clearly documented in the accents of Philadelphia, New York City, and Rhode Island; 17% of Americans have no merger. In the Philadelphia accent, the three-way contrast is preserved, but ''merry'' tends to be merged with ''Murray'', and ''ferry'' can likewise be a homophone of ''furry'' (see ''merry''–''Murray'' merger below). The three-way contrast is found in about 17% of American English speakers overall.
* The ''Mary''–''marry'' merger is found alone, with 16% of American English speakers overall, particularly in the Northeast.
* The ''Mary''–''merry'' merger is found alone among Anglophones in Montreal and in the American South, with 9% of American English speakers overall, particularly in the East.
* The ''merry–marry'' merger is found alone rarely, with about 1% of American English speakers.

In accents without the merger, ''Mary'' has the ''a'' sound of ''mare'', ''marry'' has the "short ''a''" sound of ''mat'', and merry has the "short ''e''" sound of ''met''. In modern Received Pronunciation, they are pronounced as , , and ; in Australian English, as , , and ; in New York City English, as , , and ; and in Philadelphia English, the same as New York City except ''merry'' is . There is plenty of variance in the distribution of the merger, with expatriate communities of those speakers being formed all over the country.

The ''Mary''–''merry'' merger is possible in New Zealand, and the quality of the merged vowel is then (similar to in General American). However, in New Zealand, the vowel in ''Mary'' often merges with the vowel instead (see near–square merger), which before intervocalic may then merge with and so ''Mary'' (phonemically ) can be or instead. In all of those cases, there is a clear distinction between ''Mary'' and ''merry'' (regardless of how both are pronounced) and ''marry'' (with the vowel) on the other.

''Merry''–''Murray'' merger

The ''merry''–''Murray'' merger is a merger of and before . That is common in the Philadelphia accent, which does not usually have the ''marry''–''merry'' merger, but its "short a" , as in ''marry'', is a distinct unmerged class before . Therefore, ''merry'' and ''Murray'' are pronounced the same, but ''marry'' is pronounced differently.

''Mirror''–''nearer'' and mergers

The mergers of and (as in ''mirror'' and ''nearer'', or ''Sirius'' and ''serious'', respectively) and occur in North American English as a part of pre- laxing, together with Mary–merry merger and the horse–hoarse merger in most dialects with the first two mergers. The phonetic outcome of the first merger is either a lax vowel , or a somewhat raised vowel that approaches the monophthongal allophone of : , often diphthongal as . In the case of the merger, it tends to approach the monophthongal variant of : .

The ''mirror''–''nearer'' merger is absent from traditional, local, or non-standard accents of the Southern and Eastern United States, where ''nearer'' is pronounced with a tense monophthong or a centering diphthong (phonemicized as or , depending on whether the accent is rhotic or not), whereas ''mirror'' has a lax monophthong .

In the case of the first merger, only a handful of minimal pairs (e.g. ''cirrus''–''serous'' and ''Sirius''–''serious'') illustrate the contrast, in addition to morphologically distinct pairs (e.g.''spirit''–''spear it''), all of which are rendered homophonous by the merger. Indeed, the amount of the words containing is itself low. No minimal pairs exist for the merger, due to the extreme scarcity of the sequence in dialects of English with the foot–strut split (furthermore, the hurry–furry merger that occurs in most varieties of North American English results in a merger of with , removing almost any trace of the historical vowel in this position). Instead, it is a simple replacement of one phoneme with another, so that the word ''tour'' is perceived to contain the vowel, rather than the vowel. However, this change may not hold where morpheme boundaries apply, allowing a qualitative distinction to be maintained between the stressed vowels in ''tourist'' (a fairly close back monophthong of variable height) on the one hand and ''two-wrist'' (a fully close monophthong in free variation with a narrow closing diphthong) on the other hand (cf. traditional RP ). The same applies to the ''mirror''–''nearer'' merger, which laxes the vowel in ''clearing'' but not in ''key ring'' , cf. RP . Certain words are pronounced as if they contained a morpheme boundary before , notably ''hero'' and ''zero'' .

Some words originally containing the sequence are merged with either (see cure–force merger) or, more rarely, (see cure–nurse merger) instead of + .

The ''mirror''–''nearer'' and mergers are not to be confused with the ''fleece''–''near'' and ''goose''–''cure'' mergers that occur in some non-rhotic dialects before a sounded and which do not involve the lax vowels and .

Mergers of and

Words with a stressed before intervocalic in Received Pronunciation are treated differently in different varieties of North American English. As shown in the table below, in Canadian English, all of them are pronounced with , as in ''cord''. In the accents of Philadelphia, southern New Jersey, and the Carolinas (and traditionally throughout the whole South), those words are pronounced by some with , as in ''card'' and so merge with historic prevocalic in words like ''starry''. In New York City, Long Island, and the nearby parts New Jersey, those words are pronounced with , like in Received Pronunciation. However, the sound is met with hypercorrection of and so still merges with the historic prevocalic in ''starry''.

On the other hand, the traditional Eastern New England accents (famously those of Rhode Island and Boston), the words are pronounced with , but is a free vowel because of the cot–caught merger. In that regard, it is the same as Canadian , rather than Received Pronunciation . Most of the rest of the United States (marked "General American" in the table), however, has a distinctive mixed system. Most words are pronounced as in Canada, the five words in the left-hand column are typically pronounced with , and the East Coast regions are apparently slowly moving toward that system.

In accents with the horse–hoarse merger, also includes the historic in words such as ''glory'' and ''force''. When an accent also features the cot–caught merger, is typically analyzed as to avoid postulating a separate phoneme that occurs only before . Therefore, both ''cord'' and ''glory'' are considered to contain the phoneme in California, Canada, and elsewhere. Therefore, in accents with the horse–hoarse merger, and are different analyses of the same word ''cord'', and there may be little to no difference in the realization of the vowel.

In the varieties of Scottish English with the cot-caught merger, the vowel is pronounced towards the of ''caught'' and ''north''. It remains distinct from the of ''force'' and ''goat'' because of the lack of the horse-hoarse merger.

Even in the American East Coast without the split (Boston, New York City, Rhode Island, Philadelphia and some of the coastal South), some of the words in the original short-''o'' class often show influence from other American dialects and end up with anyway. For instance, some speakers from the Northeast pronounce ''Florida'', ''orange'', and ''horrible'' with but ''foreign'' and ''origin'' with . The list of words affected differs from dialect to dialect and occasionally from speaker to speaker, which is an example of sound change by lexical diffusion.

Mergers before historic postvocalic ''R''

/aʊr/–/aʊər/ merger

The Middle English merger of the vowels with the spellings and affects all modern varieties of English and causes words like ''sour'' and ''hour'', which originally had one syllable, to have two syllables and so to rhyme with ''power''. In accents that lack the merger, ''sour'' has one syllable, and ''power'' has two syllables. Similar mergers also occur in which ''hire'' gains a syllable and so makes it pronounced like ''higher'', and ''coir'' gains a syllable and so makes it pronounced like ''coyer''.

''Card–cord'' merger

The ''card''–''cord'' merger, or ''cord''–''card'' merger, is a merger of Early Modern English with , which results in the homophony of pairs like ''card''/''cord'', ''barn''/''born'' and ''far''/''for''. It is roughly similar to the father–bother merger but before ''r''. The merger is found in some Caribbean English accents, in some West Country accents in England, and in some accents of Southern American English. Areas of the United States in which the merger is most common include Central Texas, Utah, and St. Louis, but it is not dominant even there and is rapidly disappearing. In the United States, dialects with the ''card''–''cord'' merger are some of the only ones without the horse–hoarse merger, and there is a well-documented correlation between them.

merger

In Modern English, the reflexes of Early Modern English and are highly susceptible to phonemic mergers with other vowels. Words belonging to that class are most commonly spelled with ''oor'', ''our'', ''ure'', or ''eur''. Examples include ''poor'', ''tour'', ''cure'', ''Europe'' (words such as ''moor'' ultimately from Old English ''ō'' words). Wells refers to the class as the words after the keyword of the lexical set to which he assigns them.

In traditional Received Pronunciation and General American, words are pronounced with Received Pronunciation ( before a vowel) and General American . However, those pronunciations are being replaced by other pronunciations in many accents.

In Southern England, words are often pronounced with and so ''moor'' is often pronounced , ''tour'' , and ''poor'' . The traditional form is much more common in Northern England. A similar merger is encountered in many varieties of American English, whose prevailing pronunciations are and ⁓, depending on whether or not the accent is rhotic. For many speakers of American English, the historical merges with after palatal consonants, as in "cure," "sure," "pure," and "mature", or in other environments such as in "poor" and "moor."

In Australian and New Zealand English, the centering diphthong has practically disappeared and is replaced in some words by (a sequence of two separate monophthongs) and in others by (a long monophthong). The outcome that occurs in a particular word is not always predictable although, for example, ''pure'', ''cure'', and ''tour'' rhyme with ''fewer'' and have , and ''poor'', ''moor'', and ''sure'' rhyme with ''for'' and ''paw'' and have .

merger

In East Anglia, a merger in which words like ''fury'' merge to the sound of ''furry'' is common, especially after palatal and palatoalveolar consonants and so ''sure'' is often pronounced , which is also a common single-word merger in American English in which the word ''sure'' is often . Also, yod-dropping may apply, which yields pronunciations such as for ''pure''. Other pronunciations in the accents that merge ''cure'' and ''fir'' include ''pure'', ''curious'', ''bureau'' and ''mural''.

– merger

Varieties of Southern American English, Midland American English and High Tider English may merge words like ''fire'' and ''far'' or ''tired'' and ''tarred'' towards of the second words: . That results in a ''tire''–''tar'' merger, but ''tower'' is kept distinct.

–– merger

Some accents of southern British English, including many types of Received Pronunciation and in Norwich, have mergers of the vowels in words like ''tire'', ''tar'' (which already merged with , as in ''palm''), and ''tower''. Thus, the triphthong of ''tower'' merges with the of ''tire'' (both surface as diphthongal ) or with the of ''tar''. Some speakers merge all three sounds and so ''tower'', ''tire'', and ''tar'' are all pronounced .

''Horse–hoarse'' merger

The ''horse''–''hoarse'' merger, or merger, is the merger of the vowels and before historic , which makes word pairs like ''horse''–''hoarse'', ''for''–''four'', ''war''–''wore'', ''or''–''oar'', ''morning''–''mourning'' pronounced the same. Historically, the class belonged to the phoneme (as in contemporary Received Pronunciation ''lot''), but the class was (as in Scottish English ''go''), which is similar to the contrast between the short lax and the long tense in German.

The merger now occurs in most varieties of English, but the phonemes were historically separate. In accents with the merger, ''horse'' and ''hoarse'' are pronounced , but in accents without the merger, ''hoarse'' is pronounced with a higher vowel, usually in rhotic and in non-rhotic accents. Accents that have resisted the merger include most Scottish, Caribbean, and older Southern American accents as well as some African American, modern Southern American, Indian, Irish, and older Maine accents. Some American speakers retain the original length distinction (with being pronounced with a vowel that is as short as in Received Pronunciation) but merge the quality. Therefore, ''hoarse'' is pronounced longer than ''horse'' .

The distinction was once present in the speech of southern England, the NORTH vowel being sounded as and the FORCE vowel as the centring diphthong ; for many speakers, however, as noted by Henry Sweet, this contrast had by 1890 become constricted to word-final positions in which the following word did not begin with a vowel ('horse' and 'hoarse' had thus become homophonous, as did 'aurochs' and 'oar ox' but not 'morceau' and 'more so'). In his 1918 '' Outline of English Phonetics'', Daniel Jones describes the distinction as optional, but he still considers it to be frequently heard in 1962; the two vowels are differentiated in the first (1884–1928) and second (1989) editions of the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' with the caveat that in most varieties of southern British pronunciation the two have become identical; no distinction is drawn in the third edition, as well as in most modern British dictionaries ('' Chambers'' being a notable exception). According to John C. Wells, the distinction is by now obsolete in RP.

In British English dialectology, prevocalic in accents that distinguish ''cot'' and ''caught'' is analyzed as + , not since the non-rhotic dialects that have maintained the distinction feature two vowels corresponding to historic before intervocalic : and –, both of which contrast with . If is considered to be the contemporary reflex of , the merger is incomplete in the intervocalic position (at least in Received Pronunciation) and so ''moral'' and ''oral'' do not rhyme: (''warring'', however, was once and is because it is derived from ''war'' ). Before the loss of rhoticity, ''moral'' and ''war'' had the same stressed vowel , and the latter was lengthened and raised and so merged with : , which gave rise to the three-way distinction between prevocalic , and as in ''moral'', ''warring'', and ''oral'' (excluding the marginal , which is restricted to compound words) because of the derived forms such as ''warring'' (compare the wholly-holy split, which results in creation of a separate phoneme before coda ). However, the change did not affect all derived forms, such as ''warrior'' .

The distinction between intervocalic and , both of which are distinct from as in ''starry'', is stable and affects also Australian English, New Zealand English, and South African English and most regional British English varieties. In Scottish English, which merges ''cot'' with ''caught'', ''moral'', ''war'', and ''warring'' belong to the class (– + ): (as does ''warrior'' ), but ''oral'', ''bore'' and ''boring'' feature (which is + ): . The same applies to the conservative General American varieties that preserve the – distinction.

Some regional non-rhotic British English retains the – distinction (with being distinct from + prevocalic , as in Received Pronunciation), as is the case in, for example, South Wales (excluding Cardiff) and some West Midlands English.

is typically the same as , and varies. The areas of Wales that make the distinction merge it with the monophthongal variety of : (those accents lack the toe–tow merger), but in the West Midlands, it corresponds to + : or a separate phoneme: . The words belonging to each set vary to an extent region to region, and speakers from Port Talbot tend to use , instead of the etymologically correct , in ''forceps'', ''fortress'', ''important'' and ''importance''.

The Cockney English distinction between and is not related to the – distinction, which does not exist in that dialect. Instead, the split gives rise to the phonemic distinction between and in the preconsonantal position, as in ''board'' and ''bored'' as well as ''pause'' and ''paws'' .

In the United States, the merger is widespread everywhere but is quite recent in some parts of the country. For example, fieldwork performed in the 1930s by Kurath and McDavid shows the contrast to be robustly present in the speech of Vermont, northern and western New York State, Virginia, central and southern West Virginia, and North Carolina as well as the whole Atlantic coast (North and South),. However, by the 1990s, telephone surveys conducted by Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006) show those areas as having completely or almost completely undergone the merger. Even in areas in which the distinction is still made, the acoustic difference between the of ''horse'' and the of ''hoarse'' was found to be rather small for many speakers. In the 2006 study, most white participants in only these American cities still resisted the merger: Wilmington, North Carolina; Mobile, Alabama; and Portland, Maine. A 2013 study of Portland, however, found the merger to have been established "at all age levels." In the 2006 study, even St. Louis, Missouri, which traditionally maintained the ''horse''–''hoarse'' distinction so strongly that it instead merged ''card'' and ''cord'', showed that only 50% of the participants still maintained the distinction. The same pattern (a ''horse''–''hoarse'' distinction and a ''card''–''cord'' merger) also exists in a minority of speakers in Texas and Utah. New Orleans prominently shows much variability regarding the merger, including some speakers with no merger at all. Black Americans are rapidly undergoing the merger but are also less likely to do so than white Americans, with a little over half of the 2006 study's black participants maintaining the merger nationwide.

The two groups of words merged by the rule are called the lexical sets (including ''horse'') and (including ''hoarse'') by Wells (1982).

Words with the FORCE vowel that are not written with an obviously long vowel are relatively more likely to occur in the following circumstances:
* When the vowel immediately follows a labial consonant, , as ''force'' itself.
* In past participles in ''-orn'' whose corresponding past tense forms are in ''-ore'', as in ''torn''.
* in vowels ending with a silent ''e'', as in ''horde''.
* derived from a word where the long vowel spelling is used

merger

The merger or ''cheer''–''chair'' merger is the merger of the Early Modern English sequences and , as well as the between them, and is found in some accents of Modern English. Many speakers in New Zealand merge them towards the vowel, but some speakers in East Anglia and South Carolina merge them towards the vowel. The merger is widespread in Caribbean English, including Jamaican English.

mergers

The fern–fir–fur merger is the merger of as many as five Middle English vowels into one vowel when historically followed by in the coda of a syllable. The merged vowel is in Received Pronunciation and (phonetically a syllabic approximant or ) in American, Canadian, and Irish English. As a result of the merger, the vowels in words like , , and are the same in almost all modern accents of English. The exceptions are Scottish English, in which and belong to the same phoneme and so covers both and one of the vowels, and some varieties of Irish English. John C. Wells calls it briefly the merger. The three separate vowels are retained by some speakers of Scottish English. What has been called the ''term''–''nurse'' merger is resisted by some speakers of Irish English, but the full merger is found in almost all other dialects of English.

In local working-class Dublin, the West and South-West Region, and other very conservative and traditional varieties in Ireland, ranging from the south to the north of the island, the typical English phoneme actually retains an opposition as two separate phonemes: and . For example, the words ''earn'' and ''urn'' are pronounced differently in those traditional varieties: as vowel after a labial consonant, as in ''fern''; when it is spelled as "ur" or "or", as in ''word''; or when it is spelled as "ir" after an alveolar stop, as in ''dirt''. In all other cases, the vowel is then pronounced as . Examples with include ''certain'' , ''chirp'' , ''circle'' , ''earn'' , ''earth'' , ''girl'' , ''germ'' , ''heard'' or ''herd'' , ''irk'' , and '' tern'' . Examples for include ''bird'' , ''dirt'' , ''first'' , ''murder'' , ''nurse'' , ''turn'' , ''third'' or ''turd'' , ''urn'' , ''work'' , and ''world'' . In non-local middle- and upper-class Dublin and in younger and supraregional Irish accents, the difference is seldom preserved, and both variants of are typically merged as , the same as or similar to most American accents.

In Scottish English, a distinct ''nurse'' or ''fur'' vowel is also used in these cases:
* The spelling in words like , , , , , , , , , , and . The surviving (barring the ''hurry''–''furry'' merger) can be compared to words like .
* The spelling in words like , , , , , , and . The surviving (barring the ''hurry''–''furry'' merger) can be compared to words like , , and .
In Scottish English, a distinct ''term'' or ''fern'' vowel is used in these cases:
* (past tense of ''to be'')
*
* Words like , , , , , '' Earp'', , , , '' Hearst'', , , , , , and .

merger

Some older Southern American English varieties and some of England's West Country dialects have a partial merger of . They generally pronounce as , which rhymes with (compare general English realisations of ''cue'' and ''coo''). Words such as ''beard'' are then pronounced as . Usual word pairs like ''beer'' and ''burr'' are still distinguished as and . However, is dropped after a consonant cluster (as in ''queer'') or a palato-alveolar consonant (as in ''cheer''), likely because of phonotactic constraints, which then results in a merger with : , .

There is evidence that the African American Vernacular English in Memphis, Tennessee, merges both and with and so ''here'' and ''hair'' are both pronounced the same as the strong pronunciation of ''her''.

merger

The merger (words like ''perk'' being pronounced like ''pork'') involves the merger of with and occurs in broadest Geordie.

Some words (roughly those spelled with ''a'') have a distinct vowel in broad Geordie. Therefore, the merger involves only some of the words corresponding to historical in Received Pronunciation.

merger

The merger, or ''fair''–''fur'' merger, is a merger of with ( and in rhotic accents) that occurs in some accents like the Liverpool, the newer Dublin, and Belfast accents. The phonemes are merged to in Kingston-upon-Hull and Middlesbrough.

Shorrocks reports that in the dialect of Bolton, Greater Manchester, the two sets are generally merged to /ɵ:/, but some words such as ''first'' have a short /ɵ/.

The merger is found in some varieties of African American Vernacular English and is pronounced : "A recent development reported for some AAE (in Memphis, but likely found elsewhere)."Thomas, Erik (2007). "Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English." Language and Linguistics Compass 1/5. North Carolina State University. p. 466. This is exemplified in Chingy's song "Right Thurr", in which the merger is spelled in the title.

Labov (1994) also reports such a merger in some western parts of the United States "with a high degree of r constriction."

See also

* Phonological history of English
* Phonological history of English vowels
* ''Coil''–''curl'' merger
* English phonology
* History of English
* ''R''-colored vowel

Sound samples

References

Sources

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{{DEFAULTSORT:English-Language Vowel Changes Before Historic R
Dialects of English
Splits and mergers in English phonology