Dropping her T’s

You mean Cambridge educated, former editor of The Independent newspaper, highly articulate, south London born Amol Rajan? How embarrassing for your friend to be married to a twat like that!? 😂

@Stick0rTwist

I think the ‘Thursday’s Child’ posts are being drafted by ChatGPT or similar. I suspect she is having fun asking it to prepare insults and then posting them here. They sounds like a crazy collection of adjectives which I’ve seen AI produce before.

I'm sounding the klaxon to say do not talk to the teacher about this. You may need to talk to them about something important later on and they will think you are a loon and discount what you say.

I was sad when my southern kids started using the long a in bath and grass but you can't do anything about it. I am now trying to stop them using the word 'aesthetic' as a noun in a US accent but I know I am powerless. However when they talk to their posh grandfather (my FIL) they sound like BBC presenters fro the 1950s so I think it's fine and is just the way humans try to fit in with each other.

Go figure what, exactly? Your friend has a regional accent which features th-fronting and a long a sound (I'm assuming by 'ar' you mean /ɑː/, unless your friend's regional accent is also rhotic).

@AnPiscin , if you say it as how I think you are saying it, your phonetic spelling is failing miserably.

Examples I've seen are likl and giro. Try working out what words they are.

It is repugnant, and sad, but I've been attacked for being "posh" in some circles, and on my dad's side some of my family are straight-out-of-a-Jane-Austen snooty (I've literally heard the phrase "our sort of people"). Code-switching is an essential skill if you have to navigate a broad social spectrum.

I find the idea of switching how you pronounce words so that people don't automatically judge you really repugnant.

Are you primarily thinking of people who deliberately learn RP or something similar so that they aren't judged for being "working class"?

Or are you primarily thinking of people deliberately adopting a local or working class accent so that they are not mocked, teased, bullied, or excluded for being "too posh"?

Is one of these scenarios worse than the other?

Given that it is human nature to make snap judgements of other people, I don't see anything repugnant about people just trying to fit in.

I don't mind the glottal stop dropping... it's quite a nice sound in some ways.

My birth mum was a Cockney, and came from 'ackney. She had a proper good accent but I was brought up proper with a Home Counties upbringing by my adoptive parents.

So I guess I have "roots" in a kind of more "common" accent. In some ways, I think if I had sounded like an East Ender, I wouldn't have minded.

Innit. 😅

I would correct relentlessly at home., but low key. It won’t be corrected by teachers - they’ve too much on. It’s sloppy speech.

Essex people?

We're worried about a five-year-old girl's marriage prospects now? What is this, 1491?

You're being ridiculous. It's not the teachers job to teach your daughter to speak to a standard you want.

Moe-sher is how Irish people pronounce it. I don't ever pronounce a hard 't' in the middle of a word. I also say 'waw-sher' for water and 'lay-sher' for later. It looks weird written down (and I can't write it phonetically) but you would absolutely understand me.

A friend says bath as barf. Go figure.

Give it a rest @Thursdayschild2025. MN doesn't allow personal attacks.

Nothing to add but my dd(6) is autistic and only has a few words

One of them is 'wawtahh', very exaggerated cockney, which she definitely got from a particular one of her teachers 😭🥰 makes me laugh whenever I hear it

Just speak normally at home op, she will grow out of it

He’s never spoken as clearly as Paxman. He doesn’t e - nunc- i- ate as well as he might.

Is there any reason why you say it that way?
If you said My moe-sher is outside, I wouldn't know what you meant. The standard pronunciation is [ˈməʊtə].

Everyone naturally changes the way they talk - language, tone, topic - when switching between work and friends and such. But I find the idea of switching how you pronounce words so that people don't automatically judge you really repugnant.

Yeah, I remember my grandmother doing this to me. I'm from the South East. It IS "regional" whether you want to admit that or not, OP. It's pure snobbery on your part - you think that anyone who drops their Ts is an uneducated, lower class peasant.

Sadly, lots of people do think the same way that you do, so it is indeed likely that having a regional accent that's widely deemed "working class uneducated' will prejudice people against your daughter. I have two degrees but still have had more middle class people treating me as if I'm whatever they imagine an "Essex girl" is. It happened at university (including when I got far higher grades than they did). And my accent's really pretty light in comparison with most of those I grew up with ( I don't think I generally drop my ts, for instance, but even a hint of the South-East London seems to do it for some people. )

Yes, your repeated teenage attempts at an own, and desperate use of emojis in lieu of managing a pithy comment certainly inspires confidence in your bemusement.

So anyway, now that you know you are 100 percent completely in the wrong, hopefully you will no longer gibber ignorant claptrap in public - at least on this subject.

I went to a primary school that had lots of kids from the "rough" part of a fairly rough city. When I was 7 years old, a boy had to read aloud from a book and he pronounced "cafe" "caff". The teacher was scathing in her correction (I remember the words "this isn't EastEnders") and I remember seeing him look confused and humiliated to the point where I said "miss, he doesn't know" in order to stop her. That's stayed with me for 35 years. I don't ever want a teacher correcting my child's accent or pronunciation.

Don’t speak to the teacher. It’s perfectly natural, but I’d say it’s also perfectly fine for you to correct her at home - learning to speak differently in different places is a good skill. She’ll be doing it to fit in with friends at school. I did the same at around 8 when we moved - probably drove my parents mad. Then when I went to secondary my friends didn’t speak that way so neither did I. Don’t stress about it!