Distributional differences

Two varieties may share the same phonemes, but distribute them differently. Again, the north-south linguistic divide in England provides a good example. Both northern and southern varieties have the  and /a/ phonemes in their inventories, but they do not always agree on where they are used:

Northern and southern varieties agree for the first two lexical sets, but another set of words, generally involving a following front consonant, have  in the south and /a/ in northern England.

An important distributional difference between North American and southern hemisphere English varieties is rhoticity: both have /r/ but the former retain it in non-prevocalic positions while the latter do not, e.g. US car /ka:r/ v. Australian car /ka:/.