In a phonemic split, a phoneme at an earlier stage of the language is divided into two phonemes over time. Usually, it happens when a phoneme has two allophones appearing in different environments, but sound change eliminates the distinction between the two environments. For example, in umlaut in the Germanic languages, the back vowels originally had front rounded allophones before the vowel in a following syllable. When sound change caused the syllables containing to be lost, a phonemic split resulted, making distinct phonemes.
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Philadelphians born in the twentieth century exhibit a short-a split system that some linguists regard as a simplification of the very similar New York City short-a split.Ash, Sharon (2002). "The Distribution of a Phonemic Split in the Mid- Atlantic Region: Yet More on Short a ." University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics.
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In the traditional New York accent, the tense is traditionally an entirely separate phoneme from as a result of a phonemic split. The distribution between /æ/ and /eə/ is largely predictable. In New York, tensing occurs in closed syllables before , , , , , , and voiced stops (). In open syllables, /æ/ tends to stay lax, regardless of the following consonant.
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The major difference between Proto-Central Numic and Proto-Numic was the phonemic split of Proto-Numic geminate consonants into geminate consonants and preaspirated consonants. The conditioning factors involve stress shifts and are complex. The preaspirated consonants surfaced as voiceless fricatives, often preceded by a voiceless vowel. Shoshoni and Comanche have both lost the velar nasals, merging them with or turning them into velar nasal-stop clusters.
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Hence, some researchers have argued that there has been a phonemic split in these dialects; the distribution of the two sounds is becoming more unpredictable among younger speakers. Raising can apply to compound words. Hence, the first vowel in high school as a term meaning "a secondary school for students approximately 14–18 years old" may be raised, whereas high school with the literal meaning of "a school that is high (e.g. in elevation)" is unaffected.
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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. (Wells 1982: 288–89, 596; Horvath and Horvath 2001; Leitner 2004). The phoneme is usually lengthened to when it comes before an or , within the same syllable.
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In some languages, allophonic palatalization developed into phonemic palatalization by phonemic split. In other languages, phonemes that were originally phonetically palatalized changed further: palatal secondary place of articulation developed into changes in manner of articulation or primary place of articulation. Phonetic palatalization of a consonant sometimes causes surrounding vowels to change by coarticulation or assimilation. In Russian, "soft" (palatalized) consonants are usually followed by vowels that are relatively more front (that is, closer to or ), and vowels following "hard" (unpalatalized) consonants are further back.
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Older English speakers of Cincinnati, Ohio, have a phonological pattern quite distinct from the surrounding area (Boberg and Strassel 2000), while younger speakers now align to the general Midland accent. The older Cincinnati short-a system is unique in the Midland. While there is no evidence for a phonemic split, the phonetic conditioning of short-a in conservative Cincinnati speech is similar to and originates from that of New York City, with the raising environments including nasals (m, n, ŋ), voiceless fricatives (f, unvoiced th, sh, s), and voiced stops (b, d, g). Weaker forms of this pattern are shown by speakers from nearby Dayton and Springfield.
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Experimental recordings of RP-speaking Cambridge University undergraduates has indicated that after coarticulatory effects are taken into account, words such as bag, that, gab, Ann, ban, damp, mad, bad, and sad may have slightly longer vowels than relatively shorter words such as lad, snag, pad, Pam, and plan. However, no evidence of consistent duration differentiation was found in the possible minimal pairs adder/adder, cad/CAD, can (noun)/can (verb), dam/damn, jam/jam, lam/lamb, manning/Manning, mass/mass, sad/SAD. This casts doubt on its status as a true phonemic split, and has been described instead as diachronically stable, lexically-specific sub-phonemic variation.
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A characteristic sound change (a phonemic split) occurred in most southeast Asian languages around 1000 AD. First, syllables with voiced initial consonants came to be pronounced with a lower pitch than those with unvoiced initials. In most of these languages, with a few exceptions such as Wu Chinese, the voicing distinction subsequently disappeared, and the pitch contour became distinctive. In tonal languages, each of the tones split into two "registers", yielding a typical pattern of six tones in unchecked syllables and two in checked ones. Pinghua and Yue Chinese, as well as neighbouring Tai languages, have further tone splits in checked syllables, while many other Chinese varieties, including Mandarin Chinese, have merged some tonal categories.
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Around the end of the first millennium AD, Middle Chinese and the southeast Asian languages experienced a phonemic split of their tone categories. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang Dynasty, each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials, known as the "upper" and "lower". When voicing was lost in most varieties (except in the Wu and Old Xiang groups and some Gan dialects), this distinction became phonemic, yielding up to eight tonal categories, with a six-way contrast in unchecked syllables and a two-way contrast in checked syllables. Cantonese maintains these tones and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables, resulting in a total of nine tonal categories.
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In a North American short-a phonemic split system (or, simply, a short-a split), the terms "raising" and "tensing" can be used interchangeably. Phonemic tensing occurs in the dialects of New York City and the Mid-Atlantic States (centering on the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore). It is similar in its word patterns but not in its resulting pronunciation to the trap-bath split of certain British English accents, notably the London and Received Pronunciation dialects, which creates a new "broad a" phoneme from words that elsewhere retain a "short a" sound. The environment of "broad a" overlaps with that of tensing in that it occurs before voiceless fricatives in the same syllable and before nasals in certain environments, and both phenomena involve replacement of the short lax vowel with a longer and tenser vowel.
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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 367 It was then, and still mostly is, associated with ethnically diverse European-American native-English speakers. The dialect likely evolved from an older English variety that encompassed much of the larger Mid-Atlantic region, including the Delaware Valley (whose own distinct dialect centers around Philadelphia and Baltimore), since all of this larger region's dialects still share certain key features, including a high vowel with a glide (sometimes called the aww vowel) as well as a phonemic split of the short a vowel, (making gas and gap, for example, have different vowels sounds)—New York City's split not identical though to Philadelphia's. Linguist William Labov has pointed out that a similarly- structured (though differently pronounced) split is found today in both the standard and London-area accents of England, indicating the likely origin of the New York split.
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The Philadelphia and New York accents presumably descended from a common ancestor dialect in the nineteenth century, since both accents in the twentieth century uniquely demonstrated a high vowel (creating a contrast between words like cot and caught) as well as a phonemic split of the short a vowel, (making gas and gap, for example, have different vowels sounds). One important indicator of this is that Philadelphia's short a split appears to be a simplified variant of New York City's split. Unlike New York City English, however, most speakers of Philadelphia English have always used a rhotic accent (meaning that the r sound is never "dropped"). In the very late nineteenth century until the 1950s, Philadelphia accents shifted to have more features in common with the then-emerging (and now-common) regional accents of the American South and Midland, for example in fronting , raising , and even some reported weakening of .
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