This also occurs in a small area of Kent. As this occurs around the mining area of Kent, it might be a result of large-scale migration by miners from other more northerly coalfields to Kent in the 1920s. It is also associated with some American English accents in the New York City area. On the other hand, in some accents of the west of Scotland and Ulster, NG-coalescence is extended to morpheme-internal position, so that finger is pronounced (cf. Dutch vinger ), thus rhyming with singer (although the is not dropped before a stressed syllable, as in engage). It is because of NG-coalescence that is now normally regarded one of the phonemes of standard English. In Middle English, the can be regarded as an allophone of , occurring before velar consonants, but in Modern English, in view of minimal pairs such as pan–pang and sin–sing, that analysis no longer appears to hold. Nevertheless, some linguists (particularly generativists) do regard a word like sing as being underlyingly , positing a rule that deletes after a nasal before a morpheme boundary, after the nasal has undergone assimilation. A problem with this view is that there are a few words in which is followed neither by a velar nor a morpheme boundary (such as gingham, dinghy, orangutan and Singapore for those speakers who pronounce them without ), and some in which the is not deleted before a morpheme boundary (longer etc., as noted above). The above-mentioned accents which lack NG-coalescence may more easily be analyzed as lacking a phoneme . The same may apply to those where NG-coalescence is extended to morpheme-internal position, since here a more consistent -deletion rule can be formulated. G-dropping G-dropping is a popular name for the feature of speech whereby is used in place of the standard in weak syllables. This applies especially to the -ing ending of verbs, but also in other words such as morning, nothing, ceiling, Buckingham, etc. G-dropping speakers may pronounce this syllable as or (reducing to a syllabic [n] in some cases), while non-G-dropping speakers have ( with the weak vowel merger) or . Relative to the great majority of modern dialects, which have NG-coalescence, G-dropping does not involve the dropping of any sound, simply the replacement of the velar nasal with the alveolar nasal. The name derives from the apparent orthographic consequence of replacing the sound written with that normally written .