Figure 1 displays the phonetic changes to American English phonemes that may occur
due to the Southern Shift as it might occur in Alabama. While much literature on the SVS
simplifies the complex movement of the front vowels by emphasizing the relative rotation of the
pairs of high vowels and mid vowels, the nuclei of the tense vowels in both tense-lax pairs
actually fall quite far; the high vowel becomes/approaches a mid vowel, the mid vowel
becomes/approaches a low vowel