Calling pedants, teachers, wordsmiths and class warriors.

thanks, zippi. It's all coming flooding back.

thanks zipp, i love a bit of peter trudgill..

a lovely cut glass accent? surely there is no such thing.. I thought it was a derogatory description?

i know lots of people use estuary but accent used to be about belonging to a specific community or location..and estuary, for me, is much more about celebrity/image/street culture (don't get me started on all the kids where we live who call me MAN! ) which somehow has less credibility/cachet to those of us of - ahem - a certain age

here is an extract from here if you'd like to read it

"(TH): The fronting of /θ/ and non-initial /∂/ to [f] and [v] respectively: ?think? [fíÑk]; father [fá:vë]: This has received widespread attention, both by journalists and linguists. It appears in many urban centres across Britain (and beyond: Horvath 1985, Campbell and Gordon 1996) (see the papers in Foulkes and Docherty 1999 for a summary, and also J. Milroy 1996 and Llamas 1998). It is sometimes considered as a ?London? and not an ?Estuary? feature though it is difficult to ascertain, in the absence of socio-economically stratified and sociolinguistically sophisticated analyses, how such judgements are made. Trudgill noted just how rapid the change to [f] and [v] was in Norwich (Trudgill 1988: 43)). He found that whilst none of his speakers born before 1957 fronted the TH forms, a staggering 70% of his informants born between 1958 and 1973 did so, 29% of the informants consistently."

from here

bundle - there are lots of people who speak estuary english about though. It may be a new accent but it's a real accent.

re you point about register: I rather assumed this was in an informal seminar or something. I would expect standard grammer (more or less) in, say, a presentation but not really in the discussion. Accent I think is a different thing.

But maybe I only say that because I talk posh and would love to feel the identity that having an accent gives you.

agree language is a living, breathing thing which evolves over time. but there are appropriate uses for different kind of speech eg with friends in pub, giving statement to court, talking to children and it's simple to switch between each, imo.

aloha - f for th is part of the cockney accent whichever way you look at it. But remeber that some bits of accents are in wider use than others iyswim.

But anyway where do we draw the line then? Should all English graduates speak with received pronunciation (house=hice and that kind of thing)? What about new word usage and slang, like "disinterested" for "uninterested" (a recent one) or "who" for "whom" (an older one)? How many years must a word be in use for it to be acceptable?

God yes. My dh is from Devon and very quickly lost his accent when he went to college. Still peeps out when he says 'potato' though. Bizarre.

My MIL was a cleaner, comes from Lancashire and has lovely Yorkshire/Lancashire accent (has lived in Yorkshire for most of her life) and is in her 80s so also had a brief education. She speaks correctly too.

brum is the one that gets the mick taken out of it the most. and in ireland is cork (or cark)

The cocknety accent is unfairly discrminated against imo. but not as much as the west country or east anglian accents are.

Yes, my maternal grandparents lived in a tiny council flat in East Ham (having gone way up in the world from their bombed-out tenement) but they didn't say 'fink'.

my grandmother was in service at 14, on the isle of man and although she had quite a strong regional accent (lancs) she spoke properly, iykwim

You can call the total inability to speak English properly dialect all you like - it's still wrong and what the hell is the point of an English degree if you can't even grasp the basics of grammar. I despair.

senora, there are v few real cockneys around now. they're mostly mockneys, where i live. dh's sisters were born within the sound of bow bells and have lovely cutglass accents..

And my grandparents left school at 14!

I agree aloha, but I wonder if attitudes are changing, now there's ahem "estuary" everywhere..??

"fink" is part of the cockney/estuary dialect.

Oh, sod it, 'bet'.

Oh this is crap. My grandparents all were the poorest of the bloody poor - my grandfather was born in a hovel in Islington where there was a fire in the middle of the room and a hole in the roof for a chimney. My mother grew up in a rented tenement. My father grew up on a council estate and so did I. None of us say 'fink'. And everyone could use grammar correctly. And yes, if my children were taught by people who couldn't speak proper English I would be appalled. Would you be happy if your children were taught French or German by someone who could not speak the language correctly? I bed you wouldn't.

there is a real difference between a regional accent and someone who says "fink". imo.

Maybe they should ensure they go to a good (e.g. private) school first? To make their accent more beautiful?

it's a bit of a segregated world this

the more I think about it the more I worry about it

surely most people in the uk have regional accents?

and are entitled to go to university and study english literature?

yes accent. not sure if there is a th in irish