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The chap who first attempted to classify American accents did so on the basis of how people pronounced the three words "Mary", "merry", and "marry" (which have completely different pronunciations in British English). There are, apparently, many parts of the US where all three are pronounced the same. I've noticed myself, while visiting the US, that the short "e" vowel sound seems not to exist in some regional accents - those are probably the places where "merry" and "marry" are not differentiated.
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