To ask my husband to pronounce his th

I'm Irish so it's teet for me, I couldn't change it even if I wanted to and I don't want to anyway.

Why don't you work on teaching your twins to say it your way rather than asking your husband to change how he speaks?

So no one after 11 months old has ever learned a new language?

For "th" your tongue goes up and touches your 2 front teeth, for "ff" your lower lower lip slightly moves in to meet your top teeth. Thinking about the actual movement to produce the sounds might help.

This irrationally does my head in about my MIL. She says “f” instead of “th” for everything, but when something is free of charge she says “three of charge”. So she’s capable of making the sound, she just does it the wrong way round.

it’s not something she can help and she’s a very kind person. But it does grate!

(my STBExH says “f” for everything too but is also capable of making a “th” sound. Very annoying.)

I told my DH that I noticed he did this and that it drove me crazy because of where I had been teaching children phonics. He retrained himself to use the sound. Took him saying the world's slowly to remind his brain. Uses it always now and notices when others don't

Yep I actually didn't know their proper name until late teens!

I'm from Australia, still speak with accent. My kids don't have a touch of it, just deep Surrey accent.

But my husband does also occasionally drop his t's, I occasionally correct him 😃

Yes - it’s a sort of ignorance or narrow mindedness.

It's not an accent. Pronouncing th a f is not an accent, it's not speaking properly. I say this as a person from the North with a thick accent. Same way as saying 'hospical' is not accent, and not pronouncing your t is not an accent (I don't pronounce my t's either.)

It's not his accent, it's bad English. How come you have known him this long and not asked him to pronounce it properly? I'm English and my partner is not from here, so he always corrects me on my lazy pronunciation. Tell him you don't want your kids to not pronounce things properly and he needs to stop.

Hear hear. It drives me mad when people talk about speaking “properly” as plenty have done on this thread. It’s a value judgement that places a certain type of English accent as higher values than other accents. Someone even said that they had “no pronounced accent” or something like that. I’d bet they have a “very pronounced” English RP accent!

This made me remember the time when my friend's DH told me his SIM card was free. I really thought that was what he meant and asked him where I could get a free SIM card.

Then my friend said that his service provider was Three

It's kinda satisfying that not being able to pronounce th affects some MNers more than me. Maybe im infuriating someone who's too chicken to express their views. And actually, I wouldn't correct it even if I could because it shows you don't need to speak perfectly to do reasonably well in life.

It may be the circles you move in. I lived in Bristol for a while and it wasn't uncommon there.

I've lived in Wiltshire for 50 years and Swindon for 30 of them, I've never heard th-fronting here @MumoftwoNC. I've only ever heard it on tv or radio- there's a current presenter on radio one that slips between f and th and quite often self corrects.

Some can, some can’t.

yes.
My dd does it - I’ve no idea why, it’s not common in the region and neither DH or I do it. She went to good schools, we tried some speech therapy. Well, she’s got a degree from Cambridge and a good job now, as far as I can see the only time it’s ever been a problem was when I was temporarily baffled by her wanting to see a film called ‘four’.

My friend's DH has the same speech "impediment".

He called his daughter Ruth, who gets called Roof all the time. His son also speaks like his dad and can't pronounce th either.

That's a load of rubbish. Even as adults people can learn completely different languages with different complex sounds and tones like mandarin.

Thats exactly what i'm saying - the variant is not due to accent, but standard across a range of accents

I pronounce ‘th’ as ‘f’ (raised in Kent) and same as a previous poster I had no idea until someone teased me at uni. I still can’t hear the difference very well, and despite trying I still can’t form the th sound (I probably need some speech therapy!) but my kids are both aware and able to pronounce it properly, my dh models it for them and corrects them if they pronounce it wrong. I would be very hurt if my dh told me I had to ‘pronounce it properly’ - it’s not that easy, and I already feel self conscious about it

I agree. I have a friend from Swindon who pronounces Th like F, and I used to have a friend from Newcastle who did too - he pronounced Ruth like Roof. Their accents are totally different in other ways, just the Th thing is the same.

Opposite ends of the country, practically- but both fairly normal for where they're from.

"Woodlice are called cheese logs"

Bloody brilliant. I'm going to look this up!

No. What it means is that it is standard in a range of accents across the country.

In fact OP think of it like echoes of family we carry these small pieces of our past.

My Dad is from London his Dad was a barrow boy, every so often I'll suddenly sound very Peckham that's an echo of his roots. Then my grandparents are from Berkshire where Woodlice are called cheese logs, and anything with an r in is rrrrr.