best analyzed as in those accents. In Scotland, the vowel is commonly a close-mid , identified phonemically as : . The name kit–comma merger is appropriate in the case of those dialects in which the quality of is far removed from (the word-final allophone of ), such as Inland Northern American English. It can be misleading in the case of other accents. Happy tensing Happy tensing is a process whereby a final unstressed i-type vowel becomes tense rather than lax . That affects the final vowels of words such as happy, city, hurry, taxi, movie, Charlie, coffee, money, Chelsea. It may also apply in inflected forms of such words containing an additional final consonant sound, such as cities, Charlie's and hurried. It can also affect words such as me, he and she when used as clitics, as in show me, would he? Until the 17th century, words like happy could end with the vowel of my (originally but diphthongized in the Great Vowel Shift), alternating with a short i sound. (Many words spelt -ee, -ea, -ey formerly had the vowel of day; there is still alternation between that vowel and the happy vowel in words such as Sunday, Monday.) It is not entirely clear when the vowel underwent the transition. The fact that tensing is uniformly present in South African English, Australian English, and New Zealand English lends support to the idea that it may have been present in southern British English already at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet it is not mentioned by descriptive phoneticians until the early 20th century, and even then at first only in American English. The British phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis believes that the vowel moved from to in Britain the second quarter of the 19th century before reverting to in non-conservative British accents towards the last quarter of the 20th century. Conservative RP has the laxer pronunciation. This is also found in Southern American English, in much of the north of England, and in Jamaica. In Scottish English an sound, similar to the Scottish realization of the vowel of day, may be used. The tense [i] variant, however, is now established in General American, and is also the usual form in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, in the south of England and in some northern cities (e.g. Liverpool, Newcastle). It is also becoming more common in modern RP. The lax