Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to /I/

[Rankin, Robert L]

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>I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in
unstressed syllables to /I/ (should be /ɪ/ - small-cap-I) in English in
England.
>Does anyone know if this development is known in English outside England?
>The phenomenon may be confined to the syllable that immediately precedes
the stress, is that correct? I'm not sure what the conditioning factors are.

In the US it was a feature of some rural dialects, and still is to an
extent, but the environment is different.  Word-final schwa (the one that
picks up an -r in much of the world) is [I] (the same small-cap i) in these
dialects.  You see it reflected orthographically as <y> in attempts to
reproduce rustic, period pronunciation:  Arizona --> Arizony, sasparilla -->
sasparilly, umbrella --> umbrelly, Alabama --> Alabamy, and such.  All the
cases I can think of are at least trisyllabic.  Doing this with "Cuba, sofa,
panda" seems very strange to me.  There is also an [ae] "ash" that raises to
[I] in words like Arkansas --> ArkInsas; this may be the sort of thing your
SIddam is showing.

I tend to think of these as a 19th century phenomenon, but I'm not an
Anglicist and could be corrected on that.  Nor can I picture how someone who
says "umbrelly" might pronounce "communicate", so these may be entirely
unrelated phenomenoa.

Bob Rankin
U. of Kansas