used for the vowel of eat and meat, but "eea" is used for the vowel of team and cream. However, a 1999 survey in Sheffield found the pronunciation to be almost extinct there. Changes before and In certain accents, when the vowel was followed by , it acquired a laxer pronunciation. In General American, words like near and beer now have the sequence , and nearer rhymes with mirror (the mirror–nearer merger). In Received Pronunciation, a diphthong has developed (and by non-rhoticity, the is generally lost, unless there is another vowel after it), so beer and near are and , and nearer (with ) remains distinct from mirror (with ). Several pronunciations are found in other accents, but outside North America, the nearer–mirror opposition is always preserved. For example, some conservative accents in Northern England have the sequence in words like near, with the schwa disappearing before a pronounced , as in serious. Another development is that bisyllabic may become smoothed to the diphthong (with the change being phonemic in non-rhotic dialects, so ) in certain words, which leads to pronunciations like , and for vehicle, theatre/theater and idea, respectively. That is not restricted to any variety of English. It happens in both British English and (less noticeably or often) American English as well as other varieties although it is far more common for Britons. The words that have may vary depending on dialect. Dialects that have the smoothing usually also have the diphthong in words like beer, deer, and fear, and the smoothing causes idea, Korea, etc. to rhyme with those words. Other changes In Geordie, the vowel undergoes an allophonic split, with the monophthong being used in morphologically-closed syllables (as in freeze ) and the diphthong being used in morphologically-open syllables not only word-finally (as in free ) but also word-internally at the end of a morpheme (as in frees ). Most dialects of English turn into a diphthong, and the monophthongal is in free variation with the diphthongal (with the former diphthong being the same as Geordie , the only difference lying in the transcription), particularly word-internally. However, word-finally, diphthongs are more common. Compare the identical development of the close back vowel. Developments involving short vowels Lowering Middle English short /i/ has developed into a lax, near-close near-front unrounded vowel, , in Modern English, as found in words like kit. (Similarly, short has become .) According to