Tense vowels GOOSE

In St NfldE this vowel is typically realized as high back rounded. Three different types of speakers, however, tend to use centralized variants; in two of these cases, centralization is an inherited or at least long-standing feature. The first involves certain English-settled areas of the province, which have preserved the tendency towards centralization of /u/ that characterized parts of West Country England. In some of these areas, centralized rounded [ü] appears to be on the increase (at least, apart from a pre-/l/ context), and is the usual variant today among younger females, including those on the audio samples. The second case is found on the Irish Avalon; here, though /u/ centralization occasionally occurs among older traditional speakers, it is by far most apparent before /l/. In Irish-settled communities, words like school may be pronounced with an ingliding diphthong the first element of which is centralized and lowered to the area of [ɵ] , so that school may sound like [skɵwəl]. Finally, as for /o/, a minor tendency towards centralization of /u/ is evident in the speech of the chief urban centre of the province, St. John’s. That this represents a recent innovation in the direction of perceived North American trends is suggested by its almost exclusive association with upwardly mobile younger females.