Æ tensing

In the sociolinguistics of English, /æ/ tensing is a process that occurs in many accents of American English, and to some degree in Canadian English, by which /æ/, the "short a" vowel found in such words as ash, bath, man, lamp, pal, rag, sack, trap, etc., is tensed: pronounced as more raised, and lengthened and/or diphthongized in various environments. The realization of this "tense" (as opposed to "lax") /æ/ varies from [æ̝ˑ] to [ɛə] to [eə] to [ɪə], depending on the speaker's regional accent. A common realization is [eə], and this transcription will be used for convenience in this article. For the purposes of the chart below, the symbol "~" represents a continuous (rather than a phonemic split) system. The most common context for tensing /æ/ throughout North American English is when it appears before nasal consonants (thus, for example, in fan as opposed to fat).

Short-a (or /æ/) tensing has two possible forms: either non-phonemic ("continuous") or phonemic ("split"). In General American, for example, the word man can be pronounced on a continuum from the lax-vowel  [mæn] to the tense-vowel  [meən], though the latter pronunciation is much more common. However, both vowel qualities are considered possible variations (allophones) of the single "short a" phoneme in man. Therefore, General American uses a continuous system in which a tensed allophone does not demonstrate that a new phoneme has splintered off from the original.

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