English-language Vowel Changes Before Historic L

The salary-celery merger is a conditioned merger of (as in ''bat'') and (as in ''bet'') when they occur before , thus making ''salary'' and ''celery'' Homophone s. This merger occurs in the English spoken in New Zealand and the Australian state of Victoria . In varieties with the merger, ''salary'' and ''celery'' are both pronounced (Cox & Palethorpe, 2003).

The merger is not well studied. It is referred to in various sociolinguistic publications, but usually only as a small section of the larger change undergone by vowels preceding in articles about L-vocalisation . Most Victorians and New Zealanders do not exhibit l-vocalisation.

Horsfield (2001) investigates the effects of postvocalic on the preceding vowels in New Zealand English ; her investigation, however, covers all of the New Zealand English vowels and is not specifically tailored to studying mergers and neutralizations, but rather the broader change that occurs across the vowels. She has suggested that further research involving minimal pairs like ''telly'' and ''tally'', ''celery'' and ''salary'' should be done before any firm conclusions are drawn.

The merger is one of very the definite regionalisms in the Antipodes . The merger stops rather rapidly at the Murray River (NSW-Victorian border), with Wangaratta in Victoria merging but Temora, Junee, Wagga in NSW not. It is one of the very few features that New Zealand and Victoria share that the rest of Australia doesn't also share with New Zealand, and is thought by some to have begun in the 1970s in both regions.

A pilot study was of the merger was done, which yielded perception and production data from a few New Zealand speakers. The results of the pilot survey suggested that although the merger was not found in the speech of all participants, those who distinguished between and also accurately perceived a difference between them; those who merged and were less able to accurately perceive the distinction. The finding has been interesting to some linguists because it concurs with the recent understanding that ''losing a distinction between two sounds involves losing the ability to produce it as well as to perceive it'' (Gordon 2002). However, due to the very small number of people participating in the study the results cannot be considered convincing.

The findings about the lack of perception between the distinction between and for some speakers with the merger have been interesting to some linguists, because although they can clearly hear a difference between the sounds and (in ''bat'' and ''bet''), elsewhere they can't hear the difference when they come before a sound.

FILL-FEEL MERGER

The fill-feel merger is a conditioned merger of the vowels and before /l/ that occurs in some dialects of , eastern Tennessee , northern Alabama , Mississippi , Louisiana (but not New Orleans ), and west-central Texas (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 69-73).

FELL-FAIL MERGER

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English-language Vowel Changes Before Historic L