Vowels and diphthongs happY, lettER, COMMA

The reduction vowel for weak syllables in JamC is generally closer to  or even [a] in JamC than to schwa; /a/ is a plausible phoneme assignment. This has led some analysts to mistakenly posit /a/ as the target of all in-gliding and down-gliding diphthongs, as well, though there is no evidence that such glides ever terminate in [a]. It is common for native speakers of both JamC and StJamE to produce full, unreduced vowels in non-final environments where BrE varieties reduce them, but this is less true of BrC. HappY is occasionally lax for Jamaican-born speakers, whose open syllables regularly end in short lax vowels.