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Phonemic split (which Hoenigswald calls "secondary split"), in which some instances of A become a new phoneme B; this is phonemic differentiation in which the number of phonemes increases. Unconditioned merger, in which all instances of phonemes A and B become A; this is phonemic reduction, in which the number of phonemes decreases.
A split in phonology is where a once identical phoneme diverges in different instances. A merger is the opposite: where two (or more) phonemes merge and become indistinguishable. In English, this happens most often with vowels, although not exclusively. See phonemic differentiation for more information.
In Welsh English, the split is also absent in parts of North Wales under influence from Merseyside and Cheshire accents [3] and in the south of Pembrokeshire, where English overtook Welsh long before that occurred in the rest of Wales. [4] The origin of the split is the unrounding of /ʊ/ in Early Modern English, resulting in the phoneme /ʌ/.
The weak vowel merger is a phonemic merger of the unstressed /ɪ/ (sometimes written as /ɨ/) with /ə/ with in certain dialects of English. As a result of this merger the words rabbit and abbot rhyme. The kit split is a split of EME /ɪ/ found in South African English, where kit [kɪt] and bit [bət] do not rhyme.
However, each vowel has split into a number of different pronunciations in Modern English, depending on the phonological context. The short /a/, for example, has split into seven different vowels, all still spelled a but pronounced differently: /æ/ when not in any of the contexts indicated below, as in man, sack, wax, etc.
The bad–lad split has been described as a phonemic split of the Early Modern English short vowel phoneme /æ/ into a short /æ/ and a long /æː/. This split is found in Australian English and some varieties of English English in which bad (with long [æː]) and lad (with short [æ]) do not rhyme. [37] [38] [39]
This distribution has become complicated by morphology in a way that is leading to a phonemic split in words with pre-vocalic /l/: those where the /l/ is stem-final are pronounced with the phonetically back vowel [uː] (as in ruler (monarch), a morphologically transparent derivative of rule), whereas those where the /l/ is stem-medial are ...
However, in Scotland, hurry /ˈhʌre/ is a perfect rhyme of furry /ˈfʌre/, but also the nurse mergers have never developed there, meaning that strut, dress and kit can all still exist before both intervocalic and coda /r/; thus, fur, fern, and fir have distinct vowels: /fʌr, fɛrn, fɪr/.