English-language vowel changes before historic /r/

Hurry–furry merger

	Distinction between hurry and furry Hurry vs. furry ([ˈhʌɹi] vs. [ˈfəɹi])
Problems playing this file? See media help.

	Speaker with merger: worry [ˈwəɹi] Speaker without merger: worry [ˈwʌɹi]
Problems playing these files? See media help.

The hurry–furry merger occurs when the vowel /ʌ/ before intervocalic /r/ is merged with /ɝ/, particularly a feature in most dialects of North American English, although it is resisted in New York City English, Mid-Atlantic American English, older Southern American English, and some speakers of Eastern New England English.^[2] Speakers with this merger pronounce hurry so that it rhymes with furry, and turret so that it rhymes with stir it.

British English and most other English outside of North America maintains the distinction between these two sounds, so that in their dialects, hurry and furry do not rhyme.

Mary–marry–merry merger

	Mary–marry–merry Example of an American speaker without the Mary–marry–merry merger
Problems playing this file? See media help.

One notable merger of vowels before /r/ is the Mary–marry–merry merger,^[3] which consists of a merging of the vowels /æ/ (as in the name Carrie or the word marry) and /ɛ/ (as in Kerry or merry) with historical /eɪ/ (as in Cary or Mary) whenever they are realised before intervocalic /r/ (the "r" sound when occurring between vowels).^[4] This merger is fairly widespread, in that it is complete or at a near-complete stage in most varieties of North American English,^{[sample 1]} but rare in other varieties of English. The following variants are common in North America:

• The full Mary–marry–merry merger (also known, in context, as the three-way merger): This is found throughout much of the United States (particularly the American West) and in all of Canada except Montreal. This is found in about 57% of US English speakers, according to a 2003 dialect survey.^[5]
• No merger whatsoever (also known as the three-way contrast): A lack of this merger in North America exists primarily in the Northeastern United States: most clearly documented in the accents of Philadelphia, New York City, and Rhode Island. 17% of Americans have no merger.^{[6][sample 2]} In the Philadelphia accent, the three-way contrast is preserved, but merry tends to be merged with Murray; likewise ferry can be a homophone of furry (see merry–Murray merger below). The three-way contrast is found in about 17% of U.S. English speakers overall.^[5]
• Mary–marry merger only: This is only found in about 16% of U.S. English speakers overall, particularly in the Northeast.^[5]
• Mary–merry merger only: This is found among Anglophones in Montreal and in the American South, in about 9% of U.S. English speakers overall, particularly in the eastern half of the U.S.^[5][7]
• merry–marry merger only: This merger is rare, found in only about 1% of U.S. English speakers.

The three are kept distinct outside of North America. In accents that do not have 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 RP, they are pronounced as [ˈmɛːɹi], [ˈmæɹi], and [ˈmɛɹi]; in Australian English as [ˈmeːɹi], [ˈmæɹi], and [ˈmeɹi]; in New Zealand English as [ˈmi̞əɹi], [ˈmɛɹi], and [ˈme̝ɹi]; in New York City English as [ˈmeɹi⁓ˈmɛəɹi], [ˈmæɹi], and [ˈmɛɹi]; in Philadelphia English, the same as New York except merry is [ˈmɛɹi⁓ˈmʌɹi]. There is plenty of variance in the distribution of the merger, with expatriate communities of these speakers being formed all over the country.

Merry–Murray merger

The merry–Murray merger (sometimes called the ferry–furry merger, but that is only the case for speakers who also have the hurry–furry merger) is a merger of /ɛ/ and /ʌ/ before /r/ (both neutralized with syllabic r) that is common in the Philadelphia accent.^[8] This accent does not usually have the marry–merry merger. That is, "short a" /æ/ as in marry is a distinct unmerged class before /r/. Thus, merry and Murray are pronounced the same, but marry is distinct from this pair.

Mirror–nearer merger

Another widespread merger is the mirror–nearer merger or Sirius–serious merger of /ɪ/ with /iː/ before intervocalic /r/ (in other words, the sound "r" when between vowels). The typical result of the merger in General American is [ɪɹ] or [ɪ̝ɹ].^[9] For speakers with this merger, common in general accents throughout North America, mirror and nearer rhyme, and Sirius is homophonous with serious. North Americans who do not merge these vowels often speak the more conservative northeastern or southern accents.

Mergers of /ɒr-/ and /ɔːr-/

Words that would have a stressed /ɒ/ before intervocalic /r/ in the UK's Received Pronunciation (RP) are treated differently in different varieties of North American English. As shown in the table below, in Canadian English, all of these are pronounced with [-ɔɹ-], as in cord (and thus merge with historic prevocalic /ɔːr/ in words like glory because of the horse–hoarse merger). In the accents of Philadelphia, southern New Jersey, and the Carolinas (and traditionally throughout the South), these words are pronounced among some with [-ɑɹ-], as in card (and thus merge with historic prevocalic /ɑːr/ in words like starry). In the accents of New York City, Long Island, and nearby parts of New Jersey, these words are pronounced with [ɒr] like in RP. However, this is met with hypercorrection of /ɑːr/, (thus still merging with historic prevocalic /ɑːr/ in starry).^[10] On the other hand, the traditional Eastern New England accents (famously, the Rhode Island and Boston accents) these words are pronounced with [-ɒɹ-] without hypercorrection, just like in RP. Most of the rest of the United States (marked "General American" in the table), however, has a distinctive mixed system: while the majority of words are pronounced as in Canada, the four (sometimes five) words in the left-hand column are typically pronounced with [-ɑɹ-];^[11] and the East Coast regions seem to be slowly moving toward this system over time.

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

/aʊr/–/aʊər/ merger

The Middle English merger of the vowels with the spellings ⟨our⟩ and ⟨ower⟩ (what could be called a flower–flour merger) now affects all modern varieties of English that makes words like sour and hour, which originally had one syllable, have two syllables, and thus flour and flower are homophones. In accents that lack the merger, flour has one syllable and flower has two syllables. Similar mergers also occur where 'hire' gains a syllable making it homophonous with 'higher', and 'coir' gains a syllable making it homophonous with 'coyer'.^[12]

Card–cord merger

The card–cord merger or cord–card merger is a merger of Early Modern English [ɑr] with [ɒr], resulting in 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 versions of the West Country accent in England and in some accents of Southern American English.^[13][14] 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 it is rapidly disappearing.^[15] Dialects with the card–cord merger are some of the only ones without the horse–hoarse merger; this correlation is well documented in the United States.^[15]

Cure–force merger

In Modern English dialects, the reflexes of Early Modern English /uːr/ and /iur/ are highly susceptible to phonemic merger with other vowels. Words belonging to this class are most commonly spelled with oor, our, ure, or eur; examples include poor, tour, cure, Europe. Wells refers to this class as the cure words, after the keyword of the lexical set to which he assigns them.

In traditional Received Pronunciation and General American, cure words are pronounced with RP /ʊə/ (/ʊər/ before a vowel) and GenAm /ʊr/.^[16] But these pronunciations are being replaced by other pronunciations in many English accents.

In southern England English it is now common to pronounce cure words with /ɔː/, so that moor is often pronounced /mɔː/, tour /tɔː/, poor /pɔː/.^[17] The traditional form is much more common in the northern counties of England. A similar merger is encountered in many varieties of American English, where the pronunciations [oə] or [or]⁓[ɔr] (depending on whether the accent is rhotic or non-rhotic) prevail.^[18][19] For many American English speakers historical /uːr/ merges with either /ɝ/ when it follows palatal consonants in words like "cure", "sure", "pure" and "mature" or /ɔːr/ in other environments such as words like "poor" and "moor".^[20]

In Australian and New Zealand English the centring diphthong /ʊə/ has practically disappeared, replaced in some words by /ʉː.ə/ (a sequence of two separate monophthongs) and in some by /oː/ (a long monophthong).^[21] The outcome that occurs in a particular word is not always predictable, but, for example, pure, cure and tour come to rhyme with fewer, having /ʉː.ə/, while poor, moor and sure come to rhyme with for and paw, having /oː/.

Cure–nurse merger

In East Anglia a cure–nurse merger in which words like fury merge to the sound of furry [ɜː] is common, especially after palatal and palatoalveolar consonants, so that sure is often pronounced [ʃɜː] (which is also a common single-word merger in American English, in which the word sure is often /ʃɚ/); yod-dropping may apply as well, yielding pronunciations such as [pɜː] for pure. Other pronunciations in cure–fir merging dialects include /pjɝ/ pure, /ˈk(j)ɝiəs/ curious, /ˈb(j)ɝoʊ/ bureau, /ˈm(j)ɝəl/ mural.^[22]

/aɪər/–/ɑːr/ merger

Varieties of Southern American English, Midland American English, and High Tider English may merge words like fire and far or tired and tarred in the direction of the second words: /ɑːr/. This results in a tire–tar merger, but with tower kept distinct.^[23]

Horse–hoarse merger

The horse–hoarse merger or north–force merger is the merger of the vowels /ɔ/ and /oʊ/ (actually, historically, /oː/) before historic /r/, making pairs of words like horse–hoarse, for–four, war–wore, or–oar, morning–mourning etc. homophones. This merger occurs in most varieties of English today, despite historically keeping the two phonemes separate. In accents that have the merger, horse and hoarse are both pronounced [hɔː(ɹ)s~hoː(ɹ)s], but in accents that do not have the merger hoarse is pronounced with a higher vowel, usually [hoɹs] in rhotic and [hoəs] or the like in non-rhotic accents. Non-merging accents include most Scottish, Caribbean, and older Southern American accents, plus some African American vernacular, modern Southern American, Indian, Irish, and older Maine accents.^[25][26] Some speakers distinguish the vowels by length rather than quality, pronouncing hoarse [hɔˑɹs] and horse [hɔɹs].^[27]

The distinction was made in traditional Received Pronunciation as represented in the first and second editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. The IPA symbols used are /ɔː/ for horse and /ɔə/ for hoarse. In the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, and in the planned third edition (on-line entries), the pronunciations of horse and hoarse are both given as /hɔːs/.^[28]

In the United States, the merger, though widespread everywhere, is quite recent in some parts of the country. For example, fieldwork performed in the 1930s by Kurath and McDavid shows the contrast robustly present in the speech of Vermont, northern and western New York State, Virginia, central and southern West Virginia, and North Carolina,^[29] plus the whole Atlantic coast (North and South),^[15] but by the 1990s telephone surveys conducted by Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006) show these areas as having completely or almost completely undergone the merger;^[30] and even in areas where the distinction is still made, the acoustic difference between the [ɔr] of horse and the [or] of hoarse is rather small for many speakers.^[15] In Labov et al's 2006 study, a majority of white participants in only these American cities continue to resist the merger: Wilmington, North Carolina; Mobile, Alabama; and Portland, Maine.^[31] A 2013 study of Portland, however, found the merger already now established in Portland "at all age levels".^[32] In Labov et al's study, even St. Louis, Missouri, which traditionally maintained the horse–hoarse distinction so strongly as to merge card and cord instead, showed only 50% of the participants now continuing to maintain the distinction. The same pattern (a horse–hoarse distinction coupled with a card–cord merger) also exists in a minority of speakers in Texas and Utah. New Orleans prominently shows much variability regarding this merger, including some speakers with no merger at all. Though African Americans are rapidly undergoing the merger, they are also less likely to do so than white Americans, with a little over half of Labov et al.'s black participants maintaining the merger nationwide.^[33]

The two groups of words merged by this rule are called the lexical sets north (including horse) and force (including hoarse) by Wells (1982). Etymologically, the north words had /ɒɹ/ and the force words had /oːɹ/.

Spelling-wise, words with the FORCE vowel that are not spelt with an obviously long vowel spelling are relatively more likely to occur in the following circumstances:

• When the vowel immediately follows a labial consonant, one of /p b f v w/, as in the word force itself.
• In past participle words in -orn whose corresponding past tense forms are in -ore, as in torn.
• If a shut vowel spelling ends with a silent e, as in horde.

Near–square merger

The near–square merger or cheer–chair merger is the merger of the Early Modern English sequences /iːr/ and /ɛːr/ (and the /eːr/ between them), which is found in some accents of modern English. Many speakers in New Zealand^[35][36][37] merge them in favor of the NEAR vowel, while some speakers in East Anglia and South Carolina merge them in favor of the SQUARE vowel.^[38] The merger is widespread in the Anglophone Caribbean, including Jamaican English.

Nurse mergers

This is the merger of as many as five Middle English vowels /ɛ, ɪ, ʊ, ɜ, ə/ into one vowel when historically followed by /r/ in the coda of a syllable. The merged vowel is /ɜː/ or /əː/ in Received Pronunciation, and /ɝ/ or /ɚ/ in American, Canadian, and Irish English. As a result of this merger, the vowels in words like fir, fur, and fern are the same in almost all modern accents of English; the exceptions are Scottish English and some varieties of Irish English. John C. Wells briefly calls this the NURSE merger.^[39] The three separate vowels are retained by some speakers of Scottish English and what has been called the term–nurse merger is resisted by some Irish English speakers, 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 of Irish English, ranging from the south to the north of the island, the typical English phoneme /ɜːr/ actually retains an opposition as two separate phonemes: /ɛːɹ/ and /ʊːɹ/. For example, the words earn and urn are not pronounced the same in these varieties. In these traditional accents, this NURSE vowel, when after a labial consonant (e.g. fern), when spelled as "ur" or "or" (e.g. word), or when spelled as "ir" after an alveolar stop (e.g. dirt) is pronounced as /ʊ/; in all other situations, this NURSE vowel is pronounced as /ɛ/.^[40] Example words with /ɛ/ include certain [ˈsɛːɹtn̩], chirp [tʃɛːɹp], circle [ˈsɛːɹkəl], earn [ɛːɹn], earth [ɛːɹt], girl [ɡɛːɹl], germ [dʒɛːɹm], heard or herd [hɛːɹd], irk [ɛːɹk], and tern [tɛːɹn]. Example words for /ʊ/ include bird [bʊːɹd], dirt [dʊːɹt], first [fʊːɹst], murder [ˈmʊːɹdɚ], nurse [ˈnʊːɹs], turn [tʊːɹn], third or turd [tʊːɹd], urn [ʊːɹn], work [wʊːɹk], and world [wʊːɹld]. In non-local (middle- and upper-class) Dublin and in younger and supraregional Irish accents, this opposition is seldom preserved, with both of the /ɜr/ phonemes typically merged as [ɚː], the same as, or similar to, most American accents.

In Scottish English, a distinct nurse or fur vowel is also used in:

• The spelling ⟨or⟩ in words like attorney, word, work, world, worm, worse, worship, worst, wort, worth and worthy. Compare the surviving /ʌr/ (barring the Hurry–furry merger) in words like worry.^[41]
• The spelling ⟨our⟩ in words like adjourn, courteous, courtesy, journal, journey, scourge and sojourn. Compare the surviving /ʌr/ (barring the Hurry–furry merger) in words like courage, flourish and nourish.^[42][43]

In Scottish English, a distinct term or fern vowel is used in:

• Were (past tense of to be)
• In words like dearth, earl, early, earn, earnest, Earp, earth, heard, hearse, Hearst, learn, learnt, pearl, rehearse, search and yearn:

Nurse–near merger

In older varieties of Southern American English and some of England's West Country dialects, words like beard is pronounced very close to bird, though more precisely as /bjɝd/,^[44] meaning that there is no complete merger: word pairs like beer and burr are still distinguished as /bjɝ/ vs. /bɝ/. However, if the syllable begins with a consonant cluster (e.g. queer) or a palato-alveolar consonant (e.g. cheer), then there is no /j/ sound: /kwɝ/, /tʃɝ/. It is thus possible that pairs like steer-stir are merged in some accents as /stɝ/, although this is not explicitly reported in the literature.

There is evidence that African American Vernacular English speakers in Memphis, Tennessee, merge both /ɪr/ and /ɛər/ with /ɝ/, so that here and hair are both homophonous with the strong pronunciation of her.^[45]

Nurse–north merger

The nurse–north merger (of words like perk towards the sound of pork) involves English vowels /ɜr/ and /ɔr/ into [ɔː] that occurs in broadest Geordie.^[46]

Square–nurse merger

The square–nurse merger or fur–fair merger is a merger of /ɜː(r)/ with /eə(r)/ that occurs in some accents (for example Liverpool, new Dublin, and Belfast).^[47] The phonemes are merged to [ɛ:] in Hull and Middlesbrough.^[48][49][50]

Shorrocks reports that, in the dialect of Bolton, the two sets are generally merged to /ɵ:/, but some NURSE words such as first have a short /ɵ/.^[51]

This merger is found in some varieties of African American Vernacular English to the sound IPA: [ɜɹ]: "A recent development reported for some AAE (in Memphis, but likely found elsewhere)".^[52] This is exemplified in Chingy's song "Right Thurr"; the merger is heard at the beginning of the song, but he goes on to use standard pronunciation for the rest of the song.

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