to a slight majority of 16th and 17th century sources. In raspberry we find rather than . The pattern of lengthening shown here for Received Pronunciation is generally found in southern England, the Caribbean, and the Southern hemisphere (parts of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). In North America, with the possible exception of older Boston accents, broadening is found only in father (the success of broadening in this word alone in North America unexplained) and pasta (which follows the general pattern for recent Italian loanwords, cf. mafia). In the Boston area there has historically been a tendency to copy RP lengthening which perhaps reached its zenith in the 1930s but has since receded in the face of general North American norms. In Irish English broadening is found only in father (which may, however, also have the FACE vowel). In Scottish and Ulster English the great majority of speakers have no distinction between TRAP and PALM (the Sam–psalm merger). In Welsh English Wells finds broadening generally only in father, with some variation. In the north of England, broadening is usually found only in father and half, and in some regions master. Before nasals There was a class of Middle English words in which varied with before a nasal. These are nearly all loanwords from French, in which uncertainty about how to realize the nasalization of the French vowel resulted in two varying pronunciations in English. (One might compare the different ways in which modern French loanwords like envelope are pronounced in contemporary varieties of English.) Words with Middle English with the diphthong generally developed to in Early Modern English (e.g. paw, daughter). However, in some of the words with the alternation, especially short words in common use, the vowel instead developed into a long A. In words like change and angel, this development preceded the Great Vowel Shift, and so the resulting long A followed the normal development to modern . In other cases, however, the long A appeared later, and thus did not undergo the Great Vowel Shift, but instead merged with the long A that had developed before and some fricatives (as described above). Thus words like dance and example have come to be pronounced (in modern RP, although mostly not in General American) with the vowel of start and bath. Words in this category may therefore have ended up with a variety of pronunciations in modern standard