Lax vowels DRESS

For most speakers, the DRESS vowel is realized as standard lax low-mid [ε]. On the Irish Avalon, conservative rural speakers display variable and conditioned raising of this vowel to [ɪ] in the environment of a following stop or affricate, e.g. pension, get, connected. As noted above, the same phenomenon may be observed among conservative speakers in rural English-settled areas of the province, where raising to [ɪ] occurs before a following non-velar stop or affricate, as in head, hedge, engine, bench. Before /l/ or a voiceless velar, however (e.g. yellow, wreck, breakfast), lowering to an [æ]-like articulation may occur in English-settled areas. In addition, [ε] before a voiced velar may be tensed and diphthongized in a stressed syllable, as in keg pronounced [k^heig] (e.g. Noseworthy 1971).

A similar lowered and somewhat retracted pronunciation of [ε] for words in the DRESS set is beginning to make inroads, in a broad set of phonetic environments, in the speech of upwardly mobile younger urban Newfoundlanders. This reflects the influence of the innovative CanE tendency described as the “Canadian Shift” by Clarke, Elms and Youssef (1995), in which lax front vowels are lowered and retracted.