Should DH 'correct' our children's accents?

[OohMavis]

Or, rather, encourage them to speak 'properly'

Because I'm not convinced he should. He obviously thinks otherwise.

DH was raised in London, me in Kent. I have a typical Kentish accent, a tiny bit on the posher side, I pronounce my Ts in most cases for example, etc. His is similar.

We live in a small town in Kent where the accent is parodied locally for being 'rough'. It's just a bit cockney really, there's nothing wrong with it imo. Since moving here though 6yo DS has started mimicking it a bit, particularly since starting school. Small things like saying 'wha'ever' instead of 'whatever'. Lots of glottal stops and elongating of words. Hard to explain without saying it out loud.

Anyway, every time he does this, DH corrects him. Not in a shouty or cross way, but he'll repeat the word back to him and DS will usually restart his sentence using 'proper' pronunciation of his own volition. He doesn't seem to mind being corrected at the moment but I can see it really annoying him before long. It would irritate me to be constantly corrected on the way I speak.

DH thinks that speaking 'properly', as he calls it, will give him an advantage when he grows up with looking for jobs, and genuinely believes that people with our accent sound more intelligent than those with a cockney one. It's strange because he's not a snob at all, he grew up poor in South London and has no idea of himself as somehow better than anyone else. His grandmother (who raised him) just made him speak properly he says, and he is glad she did.

I think it's completely natural and fine to adopt the accent of the place you live. I don't see anything wrong with DS sounding like his friends. I also think it makes DH seem like a nitpicking bore and DS will not appreciate it at all - it's not like the local accent will change, he'll have to adapt his speech all the time he spends time around his friends.

Who is BU?

Nothing wrong with being able to speak like a local or like a posh kid, depending on the context.

Interesting reading.

DS does have two accents already. When standing around talking to his little friends his accent is unrecognisable. I find it quite cute but then I don't actually see what's so horrifying about an Estuary accent. (Thanks for telling me its actual name by the way, you'd think I'd know )

When he's at home he speaks like we do for the most part, except when DH is able to pick him up on it.

I have a typical home counties accent, which is pretty close to RP. My parents were both from North London and their parents brought them up to speak correctly - ie. Proper grammar and no dropped letters. They did the same with me and DSis although DSis was deaf as a little child and then when she could hear picked up an American twang from Disney films! She still drops the odd letter here and there. DM worked in the telephone exchanges and got promoted very quickly as she didn't need all the extensive elocution lessons that the other London girls needed. She ended up as a top PA before she had me - a massive achievement for a young woman in the 1970s.

My DS is now being brought up in the same way. I don't want to stamp any accent out for him. XDP is northern and DS pronounces words differently depending on who he's spent time with. But we do encourage correct grammar and pronunciation, as children are taught phonetically these days and when DS mispronounces a word he will often write it how he says it - ie. 'Expeshally'. For the sake of his learning I feel it's important to get him saying things correctly as then his spelling and grammar skills will follow as children are largely self correcting when still young.

I'm from South London, often pronounce th as ff and replace t with a glottal stop. The only time it has really been an issue is when I teach phonics, as I have to be careful to enunciate everything very clearly then, but I think that must be the same for anyone with any sort of regional accent.

Some appallingly classist comments on this thread.

Agree withCandle - accent _fine (in many cases, charming), same with dialect. But sloppy speech/slang is another matter.

There is a difference between having and accent and mispronouncing certain words/sounds.
I'm Irish, living in Ireland and there is no bloody way my kids are going to grow up mispronouncing 'th' as 't'.
I can't stand it and have corrected them both when I noticed it creeping in. I try not to go overboard, and I make a joke of it when I can.
e.g. DS2 announcing a couple of Christmas's ago 'I'm tree', and me saying 'there's only one tree in this house and it's over there covered in lights' etc.
I like hearing different accents, and used to love some of the North of England ones, when I lived in the UK.
Some mispronunciations sound appalling, though, and people may have difficulty understanding what you are trying to say.

It would annoy me. I'm from east London and proud of my accent. My dh is from Liverpool. We live in Liverpool now, and will do for the foreseeable, so I know our son, and any children we have in the future, will pick up dh's accent, possibly with a very slight twang of mine. It doesn't bother me at all. People have accents, I didn't think it really mattered these days.
(People ask me if I'm bothered my children won't sound like me but not at all).

This thread is actually hideous. Who knew so many people still genuinely rate others' worth on something as inconsequential as their regional accent?
I despair for all of us if this is how people separate the wheat from the chaff. It's so....thick!

I'm a working-class immigrant who left school at 16, but because I grew up in the Home Counties, I have a terribly, terribly naice accent. While it's done nothing for my street cred, I firmly believe this ridiculous accent of mine has opened a lot of doors for me throughout my life, because I present as much more middle-class than I actually am.

My son - like many other people - has two accents and modes of speech: the one he uses with his mates, and the one he uses when he's talking to teachers. Both are his "natural" accent, and I think this kind of instinctively-deployed code-switching is fine.

DH and I have two very different accents to our local accent. I'm happy for the DCs to use local terminology, and have some twinge of the accent, but they do need a good sense of the accuracy of the word as how they speak will be reflected in how they write. Correct grammar and spelling are important.

Time and time again, I see errors in books like "pacificly" instead of specifically. Because the s is dropped, the word can't br found on spell checkers or dictionaries, and many people don't realise that they've lost the first letter.

I'm Cornish and proud of my accent
I have a degree and my own little business
Why do accents even matter?????

Ds speaks with an American accent (waaaader not water etc) and it boils my piss.

Not much I can do about it if I'm being fair. I just stress the t when I say it and hope to Christ he'll pick up on it.

I was so glad when ds dropped the Sussex drawl, but then he replaced it with estuary, not a problem if you live in Essex I suppose but we live in bloody Chiswick! I have told him the day he says innit in conversation with me is the day he moves out .
So if he speaks properly at him does it matter if he speaks differently to his friends? Incidently I seem to remember a really funny Lenny henry sketch on accents and kids ill try to find a link...

pictish I see the vast majority on this thread are not against regional accents, but the dropping of letters and in some cases whole words.

I have a Yorkshire accent very noticeable but I do not drop letters.

The letters that can get dropped are the same as those in all other parts of the country.

Wa'a, bu'a, fink, fing, ull,........

^These are not regional accents because they apear in nearly all accents.

I've been here 15 years (from Spain) and still adjusting to some of the accents. I watched TOWIE once and couldn't follow what they were saying at all. Even some English friends can't understand that accent either. To me sounds like an extreme version of an Australian accent, but also spoken really really fast. We're Central London and I'm told my DH and DC have very "public school" accents which I probably can't really hear fully. But I do think English is a truly beautiful language and it sounds much softer and refined to a foreigner if spoken "properly".

Margaret - you think what you like of me. I know there is nothing whatsoever with telling a child that you are waiting for them to speak properly to you when you know they are perfectly capable. An example:

My dd: oh my Goddddd mum, x was so nawwww-y (naughty) at school today.

Me: dd we don't say oh my God and I don't want to hear you speaking like that. Come and talk to me about it when you are ready to speak properly.

Wow I'm so evil. You are right to judge me.

I am from London. I married a Nottingham man and later moved to Nottinghamshire. I hate the accent here and all my children have been taught to speak nicely from toddlers and are corrected if they slip up now to speak properly. When I met him he had a very slight accent because he had lived away from home for a long time but I hate the flat cap/miner/
pigeons sound the people have where we live now. Luckily my children don't slip up very often and because they go to good schools away from our area its not so hard for them. Northern accents grate on me sorry.

Thats ok deblet your personality grates on me.
Sorry

I grew up in North Herts and am quite well spoken. My sisters have really strong Estuary English accents. My mum and dad used to correct us a lot growing up (for example we weren't allowed to say "ain't" or drop our t's) and whilst it seemed to have worked for me my sisters just tawk lyk dis anyway.

One personal bug bear, however, is that nobody ever told me "th" and "f" were pronounced differently. So even though I sound quite well spoken I have to make a real conscious effort not to say farver and nuffing. Oh and I have a speech impediment which means I can't pronounce my "ings" either. So singing and sinning sound identical when I say them. Lovely!

Meh. I can't get worked up about it.

My DCs have picked up a slight scouse accent due to their school and frankly, I love it. I am quite a thick scouser myself but lost a lot of it at university and DP had a thick Lancashire accent when I met him but he's now got a very generic accent that's more Estuary than anything else, because of the people he works with and where he's based.

I'd rather my DCs have some sort of identity than forcing them to sound posh. Personally, I find it hilarious to hear them speaking Bulgarian in a Scouse accent. It's rubbed off on their GPs too (who speak English as a 2nd language) because I'm sure I heard their granddad say "Traineys" over the weekend!

What about grammar that's wrong as part of a regional dialect? DH says things like 'the computer's broke' and goes mad if I correct him, when I just don't want him teaching DS the wrong grammar. DS's nursery workers all have very strong English Estuary accents and he comes home saying 'Where was you? Oh, you were there was you?'.

I've heard recruiting managers and executives say that they won't put people forward / would reject companies making sales pitches because of their spoken English. A regional accent is one thing but when it gets to the point of unintelligibility or is associated with a strong negative stereotype whether that's TOWIE, Eastenders, Coronation St, and others then there is strong prejudice/bias against it.

It's regrettable but it's life. Your son will in time learn to adjust his accent when he speaks to his father. He will probably speak in a different way with his friends and somewhere between the two to staff at school. It's not a bad skill to have in my opinion to be able to project a different image through speech and move seamlessly through groups.

Sorry that should've been 'Oh, you was there, was you?'

I corrected it automatically :/

deblet. How do you define 'speaking properly' ?

In my area they call everyone duck. They put like on the end of it seems every sentence. They cut letters off like appen instead of happen..