Unstressed vowels happY

As elsewhere in Canada, speakers of NfldE use a tense high [i] rather than lax [ɪ] in words containing a final unstressed high front vowel. Among conservative rural speakers in English-settled areas of the province, tense [i] was also a possible articulation of the word-final unstressed vowel in such lexical items as follow and potato. Today, however, this feature is highly recessive. Tense [i] is also found in traditional vernacular speech as an unstressed variant of the lexical items my and by, which in stressed position are realized in the standard fashion, as the diphthong [aɪ].