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 ?

OAR
OR
AWE

No, they aree homophones and sound the same despite different spellings.

No troisgarcons, in a rubbish accent they might be homophones but in many accents they are not homophones.

I cant even think of a different way to pronounce them .... how do you do it?

Think Scottish, think American, think West Country.

Nope, thats not helping at all

Im slightly irritated now by the face online dictionaries have removed the pronunciation thing and replaced it with a voice thing and, they all sound the same. So if the dictionary says it is so, it is so.

My parents insisted that I spoke 'properly'. Pissed me off no end, and always left me feeling that what I said wasn't important as long as I said it right. Like when you show your gran a story you have written and all she can talk about is your handwriting and the words you have spelled wrong, and you're hopping up and down going "but read the story gran!".

Dh and are both very plummy. Dd speaks with an American accent due to where we live. Ds sounds like a pontipine most of the time. I will never ever tell them that how they sound is more important than what they say.

Yabu I would have thought if you wanted your children to speak beautifully you would want them to pronounce the words properly as they are spelt ie grass and bath not grarss and barth.

Not read all this thread but get the general gist. I am from North Yorkshire but people can rarely place my accent. It is northern - short vowel sounds but I don't omit letters. I think it is important to speak clearly and not to be lazy, ie dropping t's and h's. I also believe it is important to encourage children to pronounce th not ff. I encourage my children and pupils to do the same.

Haha troisgarcons I'm Scottish, I can't for the life of me figure out how you're pronouncing those words the same!

www.howjsay.com/

I'm going to spend hours on that now ^^

I don't know wher the extra 'ris is coming in grarss - it's grah-ss - no 'r' at all, it's just soft rather than a hard vowel - I've never heard anyone say grA-ssss, nor have I ever heard anyone (other than very rural) say baa-TH, it's bah-th

Am in agreement with belmo, am also Scottish and those words do not sound the same to me either.

How on earth can you pronounce awe and oar the same - one has a w, the other has an r, and even the oa and aw sounds are very different .

I read somewhere that an "educated Irish" accent was actually, phonetically, the most correct way to speak English .

My children have three accents each - the crappy one they use with mates, a slightly better one (better as in actually pronouncing sounds like t and ing) at home, and a very pleasant "Granny is on the phone" voice, which I hope is the one they will cultivate as adults.

It's still a local accent, but it is understandable to adults .

My dd does speak like this, I have no idea where it has come from

Oar, or and awe all sound the same to me - I can't pronounce them differently however hard I think. Even worse, L and OW are very similar too. I cannot say the letter L without people asking for clarification.

So I'm a Southerner and proof that southern accents can be right common too

cory, I'm about 30 miles east of you. Not far enough to speak any better than your locals!

I went to Hull university. Many of my lecturers had proper "lurcal" (if you've been to Hull you'll get it) accents. So nothing to do with education as these guys were Drs and professors.

I'm a southerner and quite posh. DH is a northerner who has been in London for nearly 30 years and the northern accent has softened. The DC are well spoken because they have attended schools where the other children are well spoken too. We all creased up yesterday at supper time when dh suddenly came out with "I were goin ter get mesen a pair of all weathers there were a ruddy kind int shop gettin his first pair a rugby boots and I giv up".

We think he might have been a bit too relaxed and had had a beer or two too many. It was a rare step back in time. .

I have a strongish accent, and really have to concentrate on not using slang etc.

DC are unbelievably posh and I love it.

I'm a Southerner in Birmingham and my kids call me Mommy too :)

A is for apple , not Arpple

so barth etc is just wrong

DC speak well with lovely English accents.

I like it much more than my accent.

Just run a test here with oar/awe

Sounds the same to my ears! but DH is insisting hes saying oo-aah for oar

But one has an "r".

So it's pronounced like "or" or bore, or sore or soar or core.

The other one has a "w", like saw or law or paw.

Surely you wouldn't say "I sored down the tree" or "I sore a ship go sailing by", would you? If you were talking about your limping dog, would you say "his poor paw" or "his poor poor" or "his paw paw" (as in pau-pau ).

They aren't the same, are they .