Phonological History of English High Front Vowels - Happy-tensing

Happy-tensing

Happy-tensing is the process in which final lax becomes tense in words like happy. Happy-tensing is absent from many varieties of British English and, traditionally at least, from Southern American English. Other realizations of the final vowel are also possible, such as in Scottish English. The history of happy-tensing is difficult to pin down; the fact that it is uniformly present in South African English, Australian English, and New Zealand English implies that it was present in southern British English already at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet it is not mentioned by descriptive phoneticians until the early 20th century, and even then at first only in American English. The British phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis believes that the vowel moved from to in Britain the second quarter of the nineteenth century before reverting to in Britain towards the last quarter of the twentieth century.