The salary-celery merger is a conditioned merger of /æ/ (as in bat) and /ɛ/ (as in bet) when they occur before /l/, thus making salary and celery homophones. The merger is not well studied. It is referred to in various sociolinguistic publications, but usually only as a small section of the larger change undergone by vowels preceding /l/ in articles about l-vocalisation. This merger has been detected in the English spoken in New Zealand and in Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia.

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  • The salary-celery merger is a conditioned merger of /æ/ (as in bat) and /ɛ/ (as in bet) when they occur before /l/, thus making salary and celery homophones. The merger is not well studied. It is referred to in various sociolinguistic publications, but usually only as a small section of the larger change undergone by vowels preceding /l/ in articles about l-vocalisation. This merger has been detected in the English spoken in New Zealand and in Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia. In varieties with the merger, salary and celery are both pronounced /sæləri/ (Cox & Palethorpe, 2003). (Most Victorians and New Zealanders do not exhibit l-vocalisation. ) The Cox and Palethorpe study presented at a 2003 conference tested just one group of speakers from Victoria: 13 fifteen year-old girls from a Catholic girl’s school in Wangaratta. Their pronunciations were compared to those of school girl groups in the towns of Temora, Junee and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. In the study conducted by Cox and Palethorpe, the group in Wangaratta exhibited the merge while speakers in Temora, Junee and Wagga Wagga did not. In the same study Cox and Palethorpe note that "There is no evidence in this data of raised /æ/ before /l/ as in “Elbert” for “Albert”, a phenomenon that has been popularly suggested for Victorians. " Horsfield (2001) investigates the effects of postvocalic /l/ on the preceding vowels in New Zealand English; her investigation covers all of the New Zealand English vowels and is not specifically tailored to studying mergers and neutralizations, but rather the broader change that occurs across the vowels. She has suggested that further research involving minimal pairs like telly and tally, celery and salary should be done before any firm conclusions are drawn. A pilot study of the merger was done, which yielded perception and production data from a few New Zealand speakers. The results of the pilot survey suggested that although the merger was not found in the speech of all participants, those who distinguished between /æl/ and /el/ also accurately perceived a difference between them; those who merged /æl/ and /el/ were less able to accurately perceive the distinction. The finding has been interesting to some linguists because it concurs with the recent understanding that losing a distinction between two sounds involves losing the ability to produce it as well as to perceive it (Gordon 2002). However, due to the very small number of people participating in the study the results cannot be considered convincing. The findings about the lack of perception between the distinction between /æl/ and /el/ for some speakers with the merger have been interesting to some linguists, because although they can clearly hear a difference between the sounds /æ/ and /e/ (in bat and bet), elsewhere they can't hear the difference when they come before a /l/ sound.
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  • The salary-celery merger is a conditioned merger of /æ/ (as in bat) and /ɛ/ (as in bet) when they occur before /l/, thus making salary and celery homophones. The merger is not well studied. It is referred to in various sociolinguistic publications, but usually only as a small section of the larger change undergone by vowels preceding /l/ in articles about l-vocalisation. This merger has been detected in the English spoken in New Zealand and in Wangaratta, Victoria, Australia.
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  • English-language vowel changes before historic l
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