FLEECE in “always”?

I was listening to a 2016 talk made by Cory Doctorow yesterday, and was briefly distracted by Doctorow’s vowel in the final syllable of always: he seems to have the FLEECE vowel here («all-weez»), instead of FACE («all-wayz»)—there are two very clear and emphasized instances after the 22:40 mark, for example. (His other FACE items—weight, raid, ways, etc.—still has FACE.)

Now, always can have other realizations than the one with the FACE vowel: especially, a weakened form with KIT («all-wizz») is fairly often heard. But Doctorow seems to have categorical FLEECE in this word (judging at least from this talk), which isn’t something I’ve heard before. It must’ve been something of a majority pronunciation, though, since the online edition of Merriam-Webster not only lists this reading (ˈȯl-wēz), it actually also lists it first; it’s offered as a possible form in the online edition of AHD as well. I don’t think any other major dictionaries list this form.

(2024-01-26 update) Tumblr mutual psykhé points me to another Canadian, YouTuber Dan “Folding Ideas” Olson, who also has this speech feature. The clip psykhé sent me is his What is Vsauce? (2019); one instance of always can be heard at around the 8:49 mark. Checking his other videos confirms that his FLEECE in this item is categorical; e.g. in This is financial advice (2023), at around 6:12, and in Stream highlight (2017), at around 2:22.

Obviously one immediately wants to ask about the socio-geographical status of this form. Both Merriam-Webster and AHD are American dictionaries; according to Wikipedia, Doctorow is Canadian-British who grew up in Ontario. That does not tell us much, except that perhaps this feature is to be found among the English varieties of the US and Canada. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a formal or informal survey on this particular lexical feature but for the dictionary transcriptions mentioned above. If there is one, please write to me and point me to it.

An even more elusive question is: where on earth does this pronunciation come from? A tumblr mutual (hi psykhé :3) suggests that this might be similar to the weakening of ME ai parallel to the happY-pronunciations of monday, sunday, etc., but if that’s the case I think we’d expect KIT in always (which, as mentioned, we do find) instead of FLEECE. This can’t be sufficiently explained by the result of happY-tensing from a previous KIT realization, either, because happY-tensing only operates right before a morpheme boundary. ^[1] In any case, this pronunciation of always seems difficult to explain. Again, if a good explanation has been offered somewhere, I’d really appreciate it if you could point me to it.

This is an investigation that doesn’t really go anywhere, and I can’t help but think I must’ve missed something obvious here. I decided that I’ll write it up as a post and just put it aside for a moment.

How do you conclude a blogpost? I wish you a happy life. See you later.