Vowels TRAP, BATH, DANCE

Philadelphia shows the same split of the historical “short a” class described above for New York City, though the conditioning of the tense phoneme differs somewhat, appearing in a more limited set of phonological contexts. In Philadelphia the tense /æə/ occurs regularly only before /m/, /n/, /f/, /θ/, and /s/. Thus, one of the ways of distinguishing the New York pattern from the Philadelphia one is in the context of a following voiced stop. Items such as cab, sad, bag, and badge have the tense phoneme in New York but the lax phoneme in Philadelphia. There are, however, three lexical exceptions: mad, bad, and glad appear with the tense vowel in Philadelphia. As in New York, tensing is sensitive to morphology. The tense vowel normally appears only in closed syllables but does occur in open syllables resulting from inflectional suffixes. For example, manner has the lax vowel but manning (e.g., Who is manning the store?) has the tense phoneme as does man. Also, the tense vowel does not appear in function words (e.g., an, auxiliary can). Phonetically the tense class shows the same realizations here as in New York, varying in height to the high front position and typically diphthongized with an inglide.