North American English
There are a considerable number of different accents within the regions of both the United States and Canada, originally deriving from the accents prevalent in different English, Scottish and Irish regions of the British Isles and corresponding to settlement patterns of these peoples in the colonies. These were developed and built upon as new waves of immigration, and migration across the North American continent, brought new accents and dialects to new areas, and as these ways of speaking merged and assimilated with the population. It is claimed that despite the centuries of linguistic changes there is still a resemblance between the English East Anglia accents which would have been used by early English settlers in New England (including the Pilgrims), and modern Northeastern United States accents. Similarly, the accents of Newfoundland have some similarities to the accents of Scotland and Ireland.
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/
In local (working-class) Dublin, the West and South-West Region, and other very conservative and traditional varieties of Irish English, ranging from the south to the north of the island, the typical English phoneme actually retains an opposition as two separate phonemes: and . For example, the words "earn" and "urn" are not pronounced the same in these varieties. In these traditional accents, this vowel, when after a labial consonant (e.g. "fern"), when spelled as "ur" or "or" (e.g. "word"), or when spelled as "ir" after an alveolar stop (e.g. "dirt") is pronounced as ; in all other situations, this vowel is pronounced as . Example words with include "certain" , "chirp" , "circle" , "earn" , "earth" , "girl" , "germ" , "heard" or "herd" , "irk" , and "tern" . Example words for include "bird" , "dirt" , "first" , "murder" , "nurse" , "turn" , "third" or "turd" , "urn" , "work" , and "world" . In non-local (middle- and upper-class) Dublin and in younger and supraregional Irish accents, this opposition is seldom preserved, with both of the phonemes typically merged as , the same as, or similar to, most American accents.