General shift of low vowels

The vowel shift in Dublin English is not just confined to the realization of /ai/. Other vowels in the area of this diphthong are affected, particularly the diphthong in the CHOICE lexical set and the low and mid vowels in the LOT and THOUGHT sets which usually have a lower realization than in Britain (or unrounded in the case of the LOT vowel): boy  , pot  , law  . These realizations show that the change has the characteristics of a chain shift, that is, it affects several segments by a process of retraction and raising in phonological vowel space. This can be seen from the following tables which summarize the various vowel developments.