I think the instability is mostly before word-final and pre-consonantal /l/, especially the latter, though the merger of TRAP and DRESS before /l/ found in New Zealand and parts of Australia does happen if the /l/ is intervocalic; it even gets called the celery/salary merger.Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 16, 2024 2:13 pm I get the impression from this that /V[+back]l/ and especially /V[+back]lC/ and /V[+back]l#/ sequences are very unstable in English dialects, considering that pretty much all the respondents here have different distributions and realizations, whether phonemic or phonetic, of historical phonemic back vowels in these positions, including people who speak NAE varieties (Nort and myself), AusE varieties (Darren and vlad), EngE varieties (anteallach), or varieties that are somewhere between SAE and AusE (bradrn).
My distribution is quite similar to vlad's, including the patterning of the two GOAT allophones. However I retain STRUT in all the words which historically have it, and I'm even less convinced of a distinction between GOAL and LOT before pre-consonantal (except /j/: volume has LOT) or word-final /l/ than he is. I also have that LOT/GOAL vowel in bald (but not bawled) unless I'm artificially distinguishing it from bold.