to not want school to teach my kids how to speak in the way the teachers wants?

[bellabreeze]

Having irish accents the teacher of some of my kids has told me they would do little speech classes so they speak different.. its not the accent but its things like saying 'ting' not 'thing' and dat not that and stuff like that really.. I think.. I don't think it is important enough to waste time doing? But maybe I am wrong?

Cailin, I've asked the r question many times to no avail...

hully - my teacher said that when I was at school - is it so very odd?

YES

blimey

Why?

I would have thought speech therapy is fairly common for children, or am I getting the wrong end of the stick? IIRC there's a few people on MN alone who do it, so it can't be that rare. It's just the OP doesn't reckon it's appropriate here, and I tend to agree with her.

The dis and dat thing is related to Irish - it's analogous to the way French people have difficulty with "r" and certain consonants.

oh spech THERAPY fair enough (although I have never ever heard of it being offered for dialects/accents..)

What's interesting (but off topic) is that we do have two quite different types of "th" sound, used in Standard English at the beginning of "this" and "thin", but only professional linguists ever distinguish between the two sounds because the rest of us have no way of writing down the difference.

I have a quasi-phoneme in my (standard) accent which has no Midlands equivalent, and which my Midlands DH can't hear at all - I've forgotten which one it is though .

If a child with English as its mother-tongue cannot say /th/, speech therapy is appropriate.

Hiberno-English is a separate recognised form of English Bonsoir, and in that form of English, dis and dat are acceptable, and don't warrant speech therapy. Otherwise every single person in the Midlands of Ireland would speech therapy and that would be bonkers, non?

I assume that's what she meant hully, she'd described it as speech classes.

dilys - that's pretty cool!

There would be two kinds of 'th' ... I know my DH says a different one from what's standard because in his first language 'th' doesn't exist, but I can't quite hear the difference myself.

cailin - it's ok, we could round them up and put them all in some kind of special ed classes, and give them pictures of the queen (who I'm willing to bet doesn't speak what anyone on this thread thinks is RP). They could chant 'the English, the English, the English are best' as practice.

It'd be very sweet and not at all dubious.

Really, if we only hadn't lost control of all the colonies, we could do this everywhere.

Not bonkers, but very expensive!

If a child with English as its mother-tongue cannot say /th/, speech therapy is appropriate.

Not if they are Irish it isn't. You think that most of that country needs speech therapy?
My son had speech therapy in Ireland. No attempt was made to stop him saying tin for thin, because that is exactly how he should sound. Thats how I sound, and how the speech therapist sounded. Thats how most of us sound, its the norm, It;s english people who sound all odd, overpronouncing their H's.
Maybe we should offer them speech therapy when they get off the boat, to better fit in with us?

You know up your layground, bella?

Is it heaving with homopaedos as well?

I love your kids' names, btw. What a lot of kids you have!

8 isn't a lot for a traveller family. Most have 10 or more.

I know. I seed it on the telly.

Delighted you got it resolved OP.

If a child with English as its mother tongue cannot say the r in farm, is speech therapy required?

That's interesting Cailin. Like Japanese with r and l. And click languages - the click can't be acquired after a certain age Iirc.

well if you seed it on the telly it must be true ;)
Ah, there's still time for me to catch up with them lmao

I'm very curious that CailinDana says she pronounces "th" as "d" and sees no issue in that regard.
I don't believe there's a school in Ireland that wouldn't correct a child mispronouncing words in that way. It isn't a question of accent it's a question of correct pronunciation. I've lived here all my (long) life and I don't know anyone who'd try and suggest that this was simply a regional/accent variation as opposed to being simply wrong. There are probably 50 different Irish accents that could be used to say "this, that, these and those". All different to the trained ear but all clearly pronouncing the "th".

I should admit I didn't read all the messages after the utterly BS one about how we are unable/culturally conditioned to properly pronounce "th" because of our Celtic heritage.

What part of Ireland are you from What?

Meath.

Or as you might say - Mead.

Ps I've lived in Dublin for half my life.
Does that make me better qualified to comment?

I think the "d" thing is more midlands/west and a bit of the south sort of thing. I had teachers at school who said it, and I had lecturers at teacher training college (Mary I) who said it, so clearly it wasn't an issue in my education!