to positions before nasals. Apparently, it came to be restricted to those positions in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. The pin–pen merger is now commonly found only in Southern and South-West Irish English. A complete merger of and , not restricted to positions before nasals, is found in many speakers of Newfoundland English. The pronunciation in words like bit and bet is , but before , in words like beer and bear, it is . The merger is common in Irish-settled parts of Newfoundland and is thought to be a relic of the former Irish pronunciation. Kit–bit split The kit–bit split is a split of standard English (the vowel) that occurs in South African English. The two distinct sounds are: A standard , or [i] in broader accents, which is used before or after a velar consonant (lick, bi, sin; kiss, kit, ift), after (hit), word-initially (inn), generally before (fish), and by some speakers before (ditch, bridge). It is found only in stressed syllables (in the first syllable of chicken, but not the second). A centralized vowel , or in broader accents, which is used in other positions (limb, dinner, limited, bit). Different phonemic analyses of these vowels are possible. In one view, and are in complementary distribution and should therefore still be regarded as allophones of one phoneme. Wells, however, suggests that the non-rhyming of words like kit and bit, which is particularly marked in the broader accents, makes it more satisfactory to consider to constitute a different phoneme from , and and can be regarded as comprising a single phoneme except for speakers who maintain the contrast in weak syllables. There is also the issue of the weak vowel merger in most non-conservative speakers, which means that rabbit (conservative ) rhymes with abbott . This weak vowel is consistently written in South African English dialectology, regardless of its precise quality. Thank–think merger The thank–think merger is the lowering of to before the velar nasal that can be found in the speech of speakers of African American Vernacular English, Appalachian English, and (rarely) Southern American English. For speakers with the lowering, think and thank, sing and sang etc. can sound alike. It is reflected in the colloquial variant spelling thang of thing. Developments involving weak vowels Weak vowel merger The weak vowel merger is the loss of contrast between (schwa) and unstressed , which occurs in