The fern–fir–fur merger is the merger of as many as five Middle English vowels into one vowel when historically followed by in the coda of a syllable. The merged vowel is in Received Pronunciation and (phonetically a syllabic approximant or ) in American, Canadian, and Irish English. As a result of the merger, the vowels in words like , , and are the same in almost all modern accents of English. The exceptions are Scottish English, in which and belong to the same phoneme and so covers both and one of the vowels, and some varieties of Irish English. John C. Wells calls it briefly the merger. The three separate vowels are retained by some speakers of Scottish English. What has been called the "term"–"nurse" merger is resisted by some speakers of Irish English, but the full merger is found in almost all other dialects of English.