We investigate the realisation of the variable (e) (as either the dialect variant [a] or the standard variant [e]) in the Swedish county of Värmland, with special attention to the small rural village of Torsby. Our analysis shows that dialect variants that are infrequent in recordings made in this area in the 1940s are generally absent in data from 2011.  However, the dialect variant [a] does not follow this pattern. Even though it is used infrequently in some consonant contexts in the older data, it has increased significantly over the last 70 years, both language internally as well as in the speech community. Here, we present an acoustic analysis of the vowel pronunciation and discuss the social meaning this feature has in contemporary Torsby.