Calling pedants, teachers, wordsmiths and class warriors.

[shylock]

I have a question.

"fink" is part of the cockney/estuary dialect.

I agree aloha, but I wonder if attitudes are changing, now there's ahem "estuary" everywhere..??

And my grandparents left school at 14!

senora, there are v few real cockneys around now. they're mostly mockneys, where i live. dh's sisters were born within the sound of bow bells and have lovely cutglass accents..

You can call the total inability to speak English properly dialect all you like - it's still wrong and what the hell is the point of an English degree if you can't even grasp the basics of grammar. I despair.

my grandmother was in service at 14, on the isle of man and although she had quite a strong regional accent (lancs) she spoke properly, iykwim

Yes, my maternal grandparents lived in a tiny council flat in East Ham (having gone way up in the world from their bombed-out tenement) but they didn't say 'fink'.

The cocknety accent is unfairly discrminated against imo. but not as much as the west country or east anglian accents are.

My MIL was a cleaner, comes from Lancashire and has lovely Yorkshire/Lancashire accent (has lived in Yorkshire for most of her life) and is in her 80s so also had a brief education. She speaks correctly too.

brum is the one that gets the mick taken out of it the most. and in ireland is cork (or cark)

God yes. My dh is from Devon and very quickly lost his accent when he went to college. Still peeps out when he says 'potato' though. Bizarre.

aloha - f for th is part of the cockney accent whichever way you look at it. But remeber that some bits of accents are in wider use than others iyswim.

But anyway where do we draw the line then? Should all English graduates speak with received pronunciation (house=hice and that kind of thing)? What about new word usage and slang, like "disinterested" for "uninterested" (a recent one) or "who" for "whom" (an older one)? How many years must a word be in use for it to be acceptable?

agree language is a living, breathing thing which evolves over time. but there are appropriate uses for different kind of speech eg with friends in pub, giving statement to court, talking to children and it's simple to switch between each, imo.

bundle - there are lots of people who speak estuary english about though. It may be a new accent but it's a real accent.

re you point about register: I rather assumed this was in an informal seminar or something. I would expect standard grammer (more or less) in, say, a presentation but not really in the discussion. Accent I think is a different thing.

But maybe I only say that because I talk posh and would love to feel the identity that having an accent gives you.

here is an extract from here if you'd like to read it

"(TH): The fronting of /θ/ and non-initial /∂/ to [f] and [v] respectively: ?think? [fíÑk]; father [fá:vë]: This has received widespread attention, both by journalists and linguists. It appears in many urban centres across Britain (and beyond: Horvath 1985, Campbell and Gordon 1996) (see the papers in Foulkes and Docherty 1999 for a summary, and also J. Milroy 1996 and Llamas 1998). It is sometimes considered as a ?London? and not an ?Estuary? feature though it is difficult to ascertain, in the absence of socio-economically stratified and sociolinguistically sophisticated analyses, how such judgements are made. Trudgill noted just how rapid the change to [f] and [v] was in Norwich (Trudgill 1988: 43)). He found that whilst none of his speakers born before 1957 fronted the TH forms, a staggering 70% of his informants born between 1958 and 1973 did so, 29% of the informants consistently."

from here

i know lots of people use estuary but accent used to be about belonging to a specific community or location..and estuary, for me, is much more about celebrity/image/street culture (don't get me started on all the kids where we live who call me MAN! ) which somehow has less credibility/cachet to those of us of - ahem - a certain age

a lovely cut glass accent? surely there is no such thing.. I thought it was a derogatory description?

thanks zipp, i love a bit of peter trudgill..

thanks, zippi. It's all coming flooding back.

they are pretty bloody posh sounding

what is street culture if it's not community?

I don't mean the streets they live in, I mean the image put across in films, music videos etc. I grew up watching The Sound Of Music and The King & I but I didn't talk like them

I agree with Aloha.

As bundle points out, there is also an advantage to being able to move between different linguistic modes,
depending on the context.

I am not sure, however, that these particular students know this and it might mean they lose out
(as the poster who interviewed candidates for jobs has already confirmed).

And where exactly does straightforward bad grammar end and 'dialect' begin? Who makes that distinction?.

See... that Senora is talking sense {in the sense that she is agreeing with me, in my initial post, before it all went off on a fugue ).

If this was part of an informal chat and the students were on relaxed terms with their lecturer Dr Shylock and felt able to use their everyday language with her, then it's fine. If, however, they were unable to distinguish between situations when such usage is appropriate and those when it isn't (if they wrote in an essay 'I will discuss the use of metaphor in Hamlet, what Shakespeare wrote after he done Othello') then that would be worrying!

IME, the opposite problem is just as much of a problem. That is, students hypercorrect themselves and end up writing gobbledigook. 'Who'/'Whom' is a key source of this. They think that 'whom' is somehow more 'academic' sounding, so they write things like: 'In this poem the author, whom experienced a strong bond with his city, talks about xyz'. Or they use words that they think sound more intellectual, but end up using them inappropriately.

[Oh, and by the way, I have no idea in what order Shakespeare wrote his tragedies, so don't yell at me if I've got it wrong. I dropped English after A'level!]