Dropping her T’s

My eldest has autism and he picks up people’s accents. We’re in NI and his closest friend in P6/P7 had a Yorkshire accent, so DS started talking with a similar accent - not completely, but certain vowel sounds and certainly his intonation. It’s a lovely accent though. He’s a teenager now and about a year ago he started to speak with a really broad Belfast accent. If you heard me speak you would be in little doubt that I’m from Belfast, but this was something else. It was like a dodgy drama school version of the strongest Belfast accent you can imagine. I actually ended up asking him about it because it was honestly making me wince. It sounded so fake coming from him. He said he was probably unconsciously mimicking some of the people he had started hanging around with (I doubt they sounded quite like him!) This went on for a few months, while I tried to ignore it, then sort of petered out. He told me a while ago that when he said goodbye to a Scottish boy he had bonded with at some event or other, he did it with a full on Glaswegian accent. He said he walked away feeling totally mortified, thinking that he must have come across as really offensive🤣

Gosh, people are so touchy. Honestly, if you would prefer your daughter to pronounce her T’s, it is entirely your right to have that preference.

wheres the celebrating difference, if we all have to speak the same?! The amount of name calling here against wanting to pronounce T’s is very ugly.

That's a nice way of sliding out of it and avoiding actually discussing what you mean. Well done.

It comes up on here all the time. I tend to think 'Bless! Do you not ever travel?'

You said having an accident is different from dropping letters.

Well, for a certain type of English person, all Irish accents are 'sloppy speech', whether they're Roy Foster or characters on Mrs Brown's Boys.

You clever sausage!

An English friend of DH's said, with a totally straight face, 'Of course I don't have an accent' - as in, she speaks in totally accentless English. Had she been a friend of mine I'd have said something, as it was I just nodded and noted that she was quite a stupid person.

@AnPiscin ,some Scottish accents and some east London accents.

Possibly arbitrary. People have their own standards don’t they 🤷‍♀️

I’m of a similar background to Amol Rajan and I find his south London twang annoying. It’s the way he just rolls into it.

To the OP, I would watch the Bluey episode about the dunny with your child and discuss it with your own examples. I wouldn’t worry about it too much though.

You didn't have to.

I didn’t mention class.

Well, this is interesting.

clearly English words do have a “wrong” pronunciation.

for example if I see the word “water” and I say “fish” this is wrong.

beyond that, the usual argument is that as long as enough people pronounce it that way it counts as a dialect and is therefore “right” for that dialect.

water with t’s dropped is a pronunciation used by many people and therefore on one sense of the word it is “right”.

however you clearly don’t want your daughter using that pronunciation.

i think the chances she’s got it from her teacher are low to nil so she’s probably picking it up from
her fellow students in which case the teacher is not going to correct them.

if you want her to speak “proper” (god knows what that is these days as RP is considered “posh” and off-putting) then you’ll need to
correct her yourself.

it won’t work, she’ll just learn to code switch.

You are being snobbish.

Do you judge people because of their accents? If not what’s the issue then? She speaks the way her friends do. Don’t meddle too much. What can teacher do? Tell whole class to speak in a way you find better or separate dd from her friends so she can speak in ‘correct accent’?

"Sloppy speech" is just a not-very-euphemistic way of saying "common accent". People naturally speak the way other people around them do, they're not individually choosing to drop letters out of "laziness". The only laziness is in these stereotypes about the working class.

@Brainstorm23 , by definition, [ˈfɑːmə]

If you sound the Rs, that's correct too, but IPA has limitations.
My opinion is that if people understand you, it's ok.

Ones that bug me are things like Drawring and Chester Draws. FFS, speak properly!

I think you understood my post - I'd like to give you credit for having that much intelligence - but as you're pretending not to, let me explain. I find the idea that you must change or face judgement repugnant, ie that people will not be accepted as they are purely because of how they sound.

If someone happens to pick up an accent that is not in any way the same as deliberately changing how you speak for fear of judgement. You know that though and I resent having to explain it. I should have ignored you.

so a hard g, not a soft g like a j ?
What accent is this?

So what is the boundary between an accent and 'sloppy speech'? As in, how do you decide which pronunciation falls into which category?

No, don't mention it to her teacher. There is nothing the teacher can do to stop her picking up local speech patterns of her peers. What you'll probably find is that she is able to use both local pronounciation and the style you teach her at home interchangeably as she chooses, and as company dictates. I was never allowed to use dialect pronunciation at home, but tended to at school, now I find I automatically switch depending on who I'm talking to, both very natural to me.

'Irish people' say no such thing. It's limited to a few specific working-class regional accents. Like some English accents pronouncing 'th' as 'f'. 'Fanks, mate.'

I’ve had the same with my kids for their entire lives, they’re now mid-late teens.
All you can do is consistently correct at home, I’ve found they go in and out of phases of doing it.

Definitely v unreasonable to speak to the teacher about it though!

I don’t think you sound like a snob at all. You want her to sound like her family. My daughter came home from nursery saying “wa- er’” instead of water, and it sounded very odd. We laughed and joked about it and it just faded away, she reverted to her usual diction.