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The English language has undergone a number of phonological changes before the historic phoneme . In recent centuries, most or all of these changes have involved merging of vowel distinctions; in standard American English, for example, although there are ten or eleven stressed monophthongs, only five or six vowel contrasts are possible before a following in the same syllable (peer, pear, purr, pore, par, tour). Often, more contrasts exist when the is not in the same syllable; in some American dialects and in most English dialects outside North America, for example, mirror and nearer do not rhyme, and some or all of marry, merry and Mary are pronounced distinctly. (In North America, these distinctions are most likely to occur in New York-New Jersey English, in Eastern New England (including the Boston accent), and in conservative Southern accents.) In nearly all dialects, however, the number of contrasts in this position is reduced, and the tendency is towards further reduction. The difference in how these reductions have been manifested represents one of the greatest sources of cross-dialect variation.