To want my children to speak beautifully

[MiniMonty]

I'm a Londoner, we use "nice round vowels" so bath is "baarth" and grass is "graars" but I live in Birmingham with a partner from Sheffield and my kids use flat vowels which, I confess, are simply ugly on my ears.
Am I being unreasonable to want (and to encourage) my kids to use "round vowels" and to have a Southern (BBC or RP) accent ?

Having a different regional accent when you have relocated is one thing, having your natural regional accent forced out of you is different.

My family are from East London but we moved to Dorset when I was 5yrs old. I hated it when my EastEnder Nan took the piss out of my Dorset accent. I think trying to make a child change to fit in is being unreasonable and unfair.

I'd rather listen to a Sheffield accent than a londener personally I find it boring

Are you my mother OP? We moved from London to Brum, Sutton Coldfield in fact, and this was her worst fear :o.

If its any consolation I still speak RP (so she sleeps at night).

Was happily ignoring this thread until "to be able to do an educated accent"

What, you think there's no schools or unis outside the 'South'??? FFS

OP, if your DC can string a sentence together coherently, it really doesn't matter what accent they speak with.

FWIW, there's no R in bath. Just saying

OP if by "beautifully" you mean "without a regional accent" YAB unrealistic. If you mean "with a London/ Southern accent" YABU. As long as people speak correctly IMO it doesn't matter what regional tone they have (and btw, until recently I worked with a Londoner whose accent was the source of much when she first joined the team as it was like nails dragged down a blackboard - nothing beautiful about that).

And before the pedants get me (and you know you want to), I obviously meant "you think there are no schools or unis outside the 'South'". I even annoyed myself there

They will very probably end up with a mixture of your accent and the local accent if you don't want them to pick it up shouldn't have moved there.
Speak nicely to them and don't correct them ( on accent not grammar obviously) or shove it down their throats and you should end up with a nice enough accent.

My DCs speak nicely, pronounce words properly and yet a taxi driver in Wales asked " oh are you from xxx?" and named our town because they have a well spoken regional accent.

"Was happily ignoring this thread until "to be able to do an educated accent"

Where did I say an educated accent as opposed to a northern accent? Surely my post about middle t's made it clear that I was thinking of an educated/RP accent as opposed to a non-RP southern accent?

As far as I am aware an RP accent isn't really a local accent of anywhere: it certainly isn't how uneducated Londoners or other southerners speak. Dh has a non-RP London accent; very far from how most academics speak.

Please stop saying those raft extra 'R's are southern- they are London or south east.

Not so common in the south-west accents!

Overuse of the word nice

And what the heck is an 'RP' accent?

Yabu. Outright snobbery! I love the diversity of regional accents.

I'm not sure a Southern accent is so great - even here we have regional dialects.

My parents were Doarrrset born and bred and so I was teased at school because I was always a bit more "oo arrr" than my Sussex peers.

However, we're on the Sussex/ Hampshire border, and the Ampshire Accent isn't great either . This mixed with the Dorset makes me sound like I've forgotten where I left my combine harvester (or 'arrrvester) and suddenly found myself stranded in Portsmouth.

Once you get that arrrr in your voice it's very hard to drop. I'd stick with bath!

RP = Received Pronunciation, BBC accent, whatever you may like to call it. The language you hear (though not as exclusively as you used to) in news broadcasts, in university lectures, from your bank manager. Which even in the South East is often quite different from the pronuncation you hear in the street.

Cory, you're right, you didn't, I was extrapolating from OP.

I don't know what an RP accent is though.

Just makes my teeth itch when people think 'posh' accents = educated (there are loads of people round here that think that, when mostly it just sounds completely affected)

I love the arrrrr!

My children speak beautifully.

They speak beautifully Dublinese . Which I think is much easier on the ear than BBC 1950's English.

HowlingBitch, I am from deepest darkest west Belfast. No one was my friend until I was in my teens.

Can someone please explain the George Clarke northeast accent that includes incongruous round vowels. I used to work with someone who had it too... right peculiar it is....

Gah, x-posts. See, none of my lecturers spoke with BBC accent.

Surely no-one speaks like that in RL? Apart from the Queen maybe?

Cracker, I think affected will depend on where you are speaking and who you are speaking to. If you work, as I do, at a university, using RP (definition in my previous post) will not sound affected, it's just what most people do. But there are other times when it can sound affected- certainly very few people sound like that in the school playground.

Which is why I would like my children to be able to manage more than one pronuncation, just as I want them to speak more than one language; it makes it easier to communicate with more people.

MaryZed I don't stick extra Rs (arse?) into everything. It's weird to me too. And I'm very English, apparently just not vairy English

Ok, BBC accent is possibly too strong a term for most university lecturers, but ime they don't most of them speak in strong local accents either: I would say their accent is usually a kind of standardised accent that cannot be pinned down to any one location.

I see your point Cory. Maybe I only have a mild accent then, because I don't think it has caused any problem in me communicating with anyone (at least not that I've been told), and I meet a lot of people all over the country on a very regular basis without adding in the extra Rs