and Catalan. merger The merger is a merger of and that occurs in Black South African English and commonly also in non-native speech. Bad–lad split The bad–lad split has been described as a phonemic split of the Early Modern English short vowel phoneme into a short and a long . This split is found in Australian English and some varieties of English English in which bad (with long ) and lad (with short ) do not rhyme. The phoneme is usually lengthened to when it comes before an or , within the same syllable. It is furthermore lengthened in the adjectives bad, glad and mad; family also sometimes has a long vowel, regardless of whether it is pronounced as two or three syllables. Some speakers and regional varieties also use before , , and/or ; such lengthening may be more irregular than others. Lengthening is prohibited in the past tense of irregular verbs and function words and in modern contractions of polysyllabic words where the was before a consonant followed by a vowel. Lengthening is not stopped by the addition of word-level suffixes. British dialects with the bad–lad split have instead broad in some words where an or follows the vowel. In this circumstance, Australian speakers usually (but not universally) use , except in the words aunt, can't and shan't, which have broad . Daniel Jones noted for RP that some speakers had a phonemic contrast between a long and a short , which he wrote as and , respectively. Thus, in An outline of English phonetics (1962, ninth edition, Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons) he noted that sad, bad generally had but lad, pad had . In his pronouncing dictionary, he recorded several minimal pairs, for example bad , bade (also pronounced ). He noted that for some speakers, jam actually represented two different pronunciations, one pronounced meaning 'fruit conserve', the other meaning 'crush, wedging'. Later editions of this dictionary, edited by Alfred C. Gimson, dropped this distinction. Outside of England, can meaning 'able to' remains , whereas the noun can 'container' or the verb can 'to put into a container' is ; this is similar to the situation found in /æ/ raising in some varieties of American English. A common minimal pair for modern RP speakers is band and banned . Australian speakers who use 'span' as the past tense of 'spin' also have a minimal pair between