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?

I use fierce all the time. "It's fierce cold in here", "you're a fierce hoor" etc etc.

Yep I like 'fierce cold' too.

Indeed! love that sort of humour.

Thanks for the new word, Irish MNers I now have a melt. It's such a perfect term, why have we Sassenachs never thought of it? (or whatever derogatory term you use for us)

Yeah but garlic, you're guaranteed to feel a bit queasy the next time your order a tuna melt!

GoSak - if you can be a fierce hoor, can I have a fierce melt? Pleeease??

Very ROFLing, Cailin, and bloody glad I don't like tuna melt!

A fierce melt for everyone in the audience!

"a fierce hoor" - love it.

my granny used to say of someone she liked...

"she was as civil as a hoor at a christening"

if she didn't like them she would say...

"she was as hard as a hoor's heart"

Totally not PC - I miss her loads!

My gran says things are a "bakes" and a "bags" if they're shit. I suspect they were substitutes for "bollocks" that she used when her children were small, that stuck. DH says "tis a fierce bakes and a bags" in his strong English accent to make me laugh :)

When I was in primary school in Ireland 30 years ago the teachers tried to get us to pronounce the 'th' sounds clearly.

I just couldn't do it. As far as I was concerned I was saying 'th' and no matter how many times I repeated 'this, that, these and those, that's the way....' I couldn't get it right.

I was supposed to be doing a piece in a school play and when I couldn't get the pronunciation it was given to another child

I work with 2 Irish people, both can say "th" and say thing and those etc. I find it patronising to say Irish people can't pronounce th.

For the third time rebecca, just for you I SAID NOT ALL IRISH PEOPLE SAY "DIS" AND "DAT," so you can stop imagining being patronised and get on with living in the real world.

Ooo garlicbutty, that bar/far thingy is interesting, thank you! :)

I am one of those rare creatures, a native RP speaker. By the age of 11, I had learned a non-RP 'Norf Laaandn' variety to stop myself getting teased and/or hit in the playground. For the past 25 years, I have lived in Yorkshire, and I now say 'bath' and 'bus' with vowels as flat as my cap. I'm a friendly sociable accommodating sort of person, and a bit of a linguistic chameleon; and when I go to Scotland, I have to be careful that people don't think I'm taking the piss.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: accents are about identity. The OP's children will modify their accents if/when they want to modify their identities. The teacher doesn't need to teach them to say 'th': they'll do it all by themselves if they ever feel they need to :)

Good thing no one said it then, rebecca.

Its peculiarly English to think there is one "Irish accent". It's a whole country, of course there are so many. Some say the TH in a more english way, but a huge amount don't.
I tested it on one of my children earlier. He says first, second, turd. No matter how many times you ask him to say TH, he says turd. Can't even hear the difference. It's simply the way he sounds. I can do both, but tend to revert to the same way as him, its natural for us. Good luck changing that!

To those insisting that dis or dat is "correct" in Ireland (as opposed to a common pronounciation in some parts - which I fully accept - otherwise I wouldn't have grown up with a tendency to say it and hence be "corrected") - would you say that my DDs Thames Estuary dropping her "t"s pronounciation of words like bottle (boh-hul) or computer (compuh-er) is also correct (i.e. with a glottal stop rather than a "t")? Because I would definitely differ on that one (and do "correct" her on it).

Why do you correct her on it Damson?

Because there is a "t" in the word!

Where does she get the pronunciation from?

TBH - I'm not sure as most of her friends speak in quite an RP accent - I guess some of them must drop their "t"s.

So is the issue that you want her to speak more like you? I know it's pretty normal to drop ts in parts of London, so it makes sense she would pick that up if her friends do it. Children tend to develop an accent closer to their peers rather than their parents as they get older so I think you might be fighting a losing battle. Dropping the t isn't incorrect, it's not a speech problem that stops people from understanding her, it's an accent. You might not like it but that doesn't make it incorrect.

I fully accept she will speak nothing like me as I have an Irish accent and she's growing up in the UK - there's no issue there. I just think its important that she knows what the received pronounciation of a word is, which is why I pick her up on dropping her ts (not all the time - I'm not continually hounding the poor child). The more I think about it though I'm really not sure where she gets it as we're not in an area where ts are dropped.

I had elocution lessons as part of my day to day schooling, so I don't see the problem really unless the teacher was just singling them out and making them objects of ridicule, which would be unacceptable.

English has a standardised spelling and grammar: for sure it changes with every generation, but why not let them learn the current one - why not let them learn RP.
RP might come in handy to them later on- like French, or Chinese, or Gaeilge?

It's not like they won't have their heritage, or do you feel they will become strangers to you, and somehow think you are 'inferior' when they go all posh, and speak "proper"!!

Erm, it's not your thread CailinDana, it's bellabreeze's and she said her kids were corrected for "having Irish accents".