1. In the last issue of the JCLA (March 1957) I made a tentative phonetic analysis of the English spoken by the younger generation in the Vancouver area. On the basis of that analysis I propose in this article to go on to the examination of one of the problems that face us in the phonemic classification of the Vancouver vowels.

2. I should like to stress from the beginning that this problem is distributional, for whatever our views on the nature of the phoneme — whether we regard it as a concrete, practical unit, useful in the description of languages and dialects known or hitherto unknown, or whether we consider it as an abstract Platonic idea whose translation to the real world involves a series of Protean adaptations or adjustments to the phonological environment — in either case, the most important factor to be considered is distribution.