1670: How L Changes Vowels Jul 11, 2019

Although it is commonly known about the difference between the American R and the English R in terms of pronunciation before a consonant—otherwise known as rhoticity—what may be less known is the way in which L before a vowel affects pronunciation in certain dialects. For instance, in New Zealand English there is what's called the "salary-celery merger", meaning that those sounds before the L—[æ] and [e] respectively—become the same, and those two words for instance are not distinguished in terms of pronunciation. This can also happen to different vowels and other such sounds in other dialects in every English-speaking region of the word, but the differences are more subtle than the total absence of R in certain English dialects.
There will be more on rhoticity in a Word Facts Video, to be released next week.