Are fairy and ferry exact homophones?

Question

I was puzzled when a native speaker of American English (grown up in Texas) recently told me that they would pronounce fairy and ferry the same. I would expect a "long" vowel in fairy and a "short" vowel in ferry, partly because of the double consonant in the latter.

This concept of vowel length, which is important in my mother tongue German, is foreign to that speaker and confuses them. Merriam-Webster provides two possible pronunciations for ferry, one of which is identical to the one for fairy, but their phonetic spelling doesn't seem to distinguish vowel lengths at all.

Obviously, given the heterogeneous English speaking community, there may not be one right answer at all; I'm interested in all accents and aspects.

Edit: Collins provides different pronunciations for fairy and ferry; their audio samples come closer to how I would pronounce the words.

Answer 1

As pointed out in comments, Modern English does not have vowel length. The so-called "long vowels" are modern descendants of the Middle English long vowels, which were changed by the Great Vowel Shift into tense vowels, no longer than any other. Unfortunately, this happened after the rules of English spelling got more or less fixed.

So the original difference between fairy and ferry was long/short vowel, which changed to tense/lax after the GVS. But in American English there was a further development. The distinction between tense and lax vowels tended to neutralize before /r/. So most Americans don't distinguish between /ir/ and /Ir/ (here/hear), or between /er/ and /Er/, so ferry and fairy are exact homonyms.

This is a regional variation; in Rhode Island, for example, one distinguishes Mary, merry, and marry, each with its own vowel. But in the Midwest, where I come from, those are all homophonous.

Answer 2

Modern American English does not have phonemic vowel length. Americans, in fact, pay very little attention to vowel length, so it is quite difficult for them to learn to differentiate between long and short vowels in other languages. In American English, in the dialects that still preserve the difference between fairy and ferry, the difference is in the quality of the vowel: possibly /feri/ versus /fɛri/ (although different dialects will undoubtedly vary).

While this is somewhat controversial, I believe vowel length plays a role in modern British English. For an example of this, Lexico gives the current British pronunciations of bared and bed as [bɛːd] and [bɛd], differing only by vowel length; similarly, fairy and ferry also differ only in having [ɛː] and [ɛ].

Bared and fairy used to be pronounced the diphthong /ɛə/ in British English, and some British speakers, as well as some British dictionaries, still pronounce them that way. And while [ɛː] and [ɛ] are the only two vowels I know of that dictionaries give as differing only in length, I am convinced from listening to British speakers that some dialects also use length as the major differentiation between beard and bid; and between cart and cut.

Answer 3

I must agree, I grew up in Rhode Island and my Boyfriend grew up in Texas. We now live in Iowa. We argue frequently about how to pronounce ferry and fairy and other words as well. To your point above about distinguishing based on the vowel. That is absolutely something I was taught as a child. It gets fun too because his mom is an English professor from South Carolina. All in all, just wanted to let you know you’re absolutely correct.

Answer 4

In a dialect survey participants were asked how they pronounced Mary [same vowel as in fairy] /merry [same vowel as in ferry]/marry.

The answers showed that the majority made no distinction: