some types of Caribbean English, the initial clusters , , and are reduced by the loss of . The following stop is then subject to regular aspiration (or devoicing of the following approximant) in its new word-initial environment. Some examples of such pronunciations are: According to Wells, these reductions occur only in the broadest creole. Final cluster reductions NG-coalescence NG-coalescence is a historical sound change by which the final cluster , pronounced (the being realized as a velar nasal by assimilation with the velar ), came to be pronounced as just – that is, the final was dropped, but the velar quality of the nasal remained. The change took place in educated London speech around the end of the 16th century, and explains why there is no sound at the end of words like fang, sing, wrong and tongue in the standard varieties of Modern English. The change in fact applies not only at the end of a word, but generally at the end of a morpheme. If a word ending in -ng is followed by a suffix or is compounded with another word, the pronunciation normally remains. For example, in the words fangs, sings, singing, singer, wronged, wrongly, hangman, there is no sound. An exception is the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives: in the words longer/longest, stronger/strongest, younger/youngest, the is pronounced in most accents. The pronunciation with is thus possible only before a vowel; before a consonant, the only possibility is a bare . In other cases (when it is not morpheme-final), word-internal -ng- does not show the effects of coalescence, and the pronunciation is retained, as in finger and angle. This means that the words finger and singer do not rhyme in most modern varieties of English, although they did in Middle English. The process of NG-coalescence might therefore be referred to as the singer–finger split. Some accents, however, do not show the full effects of NG-coalescence as described above, and in these accents sing may be found with , the suffix -ing may be pronounced (though G-dropping is another possibility), and singer may rhyme with finger. This is particularly associated with English English accents in an area of Northern England (especially Lancashire), the West Midlands and Derbyshire in the East Midlands, and is also present in north-east varieties of Welsh English. This includes the cities of Birmingham (see Brummie), Manchester, Liverpool (see Scouse), Sheffield and Stoke-on-Trent.