Some older Southern American English varieties and some of England's West Country dialects have a partial merger of '. They generally pronounce ' as , which rhymes with (compare general English realisations of "cue" and "coo"). Words such as "beard" are then pronounced as . Usual word pairs like "beer" and "burr" are still distinguished as and . However, is dropped after a consonant cluster (as in "queer") or a palato-alveolar consonant (as in "cheer"), likely because of phonotactic constraints, which then results in a merger with : , .