Correcting Dh’s grammar in front of dd because she’s starting to pick up his way of speaking.

[CocoDeMoll]

I’m not a snob in any way, seriously!!

My dd is 5 and she now attends a little local primary where there are lots of kids from v MC backgrounds and I don’t want her being picked on in the future because she says things wrong. And for the record my own spelling and grammar is shit so I’m not judging.

She’s says ‘them’ instead of ‘those’ as in ‘can I have some of them tomatoes’ and other stuff like that because dh does. Dh doesn’t realise this isn’t correct but doesn’t jump down my throat if I say it isn’t so he’s pretty decent about it. I have no issues with accents or dialects but I feel like down the line she might get further ahead if I correct her from saying stuff like ‘so I tells him’ to ‘so I told him’. AIBU?

what is making you 'cringe' Surrey Girl?

But if we all decide to tear up the rule book and just go freestyle with grammar then it has the potential to turn into chaos. Each area adopts its own version of 'correct' grammar based on local dialect or local idioms etcs. Which is fine until you travel to the other end of the country and struggle to make yourself understood. Same with non native speakers, how can they attempt to learn English if we adopt many local versions of the past tense?

There is no rule book..:)

Our grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Non native speakers learn a standard version. They are not that likely to start talking in MLE...actually scrub that, my son has met a couple of MLE speakers who have it as a second language. It doesn't matter.

People judge others on their written and spoken grammar. It is a fact of life. Saying things like “I done” will make the most intelligent person be judged as stupid. It isn’t fair but it is true. I am from the countryside, people “don’t talk proper round these parts”. When I went to uni, i remember the piss being ripped out of me. I ensured I changed because ultimately I wanted to be taken seriously in the career I was going into.

One of my graduates clearly had a problem with both written and spoken English

He has a very broad regional accent (not a problem) accompanied by written English that is full of flaws.

It's a problem TBH. I can't allow him to email clients directly until his email communications have been reviewed and his grammar is corrected.

BTW this is something that is automatic for me for non-native English speakers so we put the safeguards in place until they are fully familiar with the language.

I just don't expect this from native speakers of English. For sure this is holding his promotion prospects back.

Yes, it's an important skill to learn the dominant dialect for your country, I did say that. It's very possible to know more than one dialect, though. In fact a lot of people do and everybody can switch registers to suit different situations.

Grammar does not have the potential to turn into chaos. It is very naturally regulated by our need to communicate. And the levelling effects of national and international media can never be undone bar some kind apocalyptic scenario. Britain is way less linguistically diverse than it was 100 years ago and that trend is only going to continue.

Correcting your daughter's grammar is fine, correcting your husband's is not.

So do those so worried about it really think that all schools in areas with a non standard dialect have terrible SPAG results? That children from Leeds or Newcastle or Bolton or where ever have zero capacity to understand standard and spoken English?

And do you think secondary schools in those areas don’t teach essay writing or, even CV writing?

How incredibly patronising.

It IS snobbery and you are teaching your children it’s ok. ‘Lend it me’ ‘he tret her badly’ ‘pass them scissors’ are dialectal. They are not mistakes.

Understanding that formal written English has rules is important. Being ‘right’ all the time isn’t and correcting your own family definitely isn’t.

It IS snobbery and you are teaching your children it’s ok. ‘Lend it me’ ‘he tret her badly’ ‘pass them scissors’ are dialectal. They are not mistakes.

Good grief. Why would you want disadvantage your child so comprehensively?

A child who can say ‘he tret her bad’ with their East Yorkshire friends but say ‘he treated her badly’ to their Sussex GP and write ‘he treated her terribly’ in a story is hugely advantaged socially and academically in my experience.

Oh and, here’s an important part, they aren’t going to be a nasty little shit who says ‘ugh it’s TREATED you know? That accent makes you sound stupid’

I’m from m Yorkshire (not east) and have what most people would describe as an rp accent. My extended family correct my pronouncuation and friends from Middlesbrough take the piss out of how ‘posh’ I sound.

Accent is nothing to do with grammar. You are right to correct grammatical mistakes OP. Learning it correctly from the start is a great advantage.

So do those so worried about it really think that all schools in areas with a non standard dialect have terrible SPAG results? That children from Leeds or Newcastle or Bolton or where ever have zero capacity to understand standard and spoken English?

Having taught English in and around Leeds for ten years, I can assure you that for many students it does cause a problem and does result in the loss of marks in exams - not just in English now, btw, most gcse exams now have more significant SPAG weightings.

I have taught many, many kids who simply CANNOT understand / remember / accept that 'we was', 'I were' etc are grammatically incorrect. The argument (because they will argue it!) is that a) that's what everyone says except you miss, and you're just posh (I'm from Essex! Not posh!) And b) you know what I mean so why does it matter?

I now have a dd aged 4. I have an Essex accent and am terrible for dropping my ts and hs if I'm tired / speaking quickly. DH is from Northumberland and has some features of that dialect - his verb use is odd, he will say things like "it needs cleaned".

Both of us watch and correct the other! And both of us watch and correct dd too! She will have a Yorkshire accent, which is fine, but there's no way that I'm going to be allowing her to grow up without understanding that there is such a thing as Standard English grammar!

My husband regularly commits all the grammatical sins listed in this thread, and more. His written and spoken English is dreadful - and he is the first to admit it. I'm the opposite. His accent is, well, Danny Dyer, to be honest, whereas mine is more RP.

I never felt the need to correct him but now we have a child. I don't specifically correct him by saying he is wrong but when he makes errors in his spoken English I repeat the phrase correctly (them/those, you were/you was). The thing is, this is what he wants. He feels that new people respond to us both very differently, he often feels people look down on him but treat me differently, he is very conscious that the way he presents himself does not convey his natural intelligence. I hate to say it but experience tells me he's right. He feels this puts him at a disadvantage and he would hate to see our daughter in the same position, so I gently model correct English usage to make both of us happy.

Furthermore, our household is trilingual and we live in a part of the world where daily life is full of encounters with people of a number of different nationalities and we have both noticed that using incorrect language makes it so much harder for non-native speakers of that language to understand what you are trying to say - be it English or any language. Correct expression makes all of our lives easier here.

And as for "I mean, at the end of the day, who gives a fuck, really?! confused", well I had to give a fuck. A few years ago now, in London, we took on a member of staff with a very, very broad northern accent - not a problem for me. However his speech was very, very heavily populated with his local dialect and included many grammatical errors.

Unfortunately our job involved dealing with many foreigners, on the telephone, in person and via email. Even those who spoke very good English really struggled to understand him. "Arrrrr fancy a brew?" was perfectly polite but meant absolutely nothing to non-native speakers, as one rather quaint example.

While in person these misunderstandings were easily corrected, this wasn't the case by telephone or email, and it got to the point where he couldn't be left on shift alone. My budget and staffing rosters became impossible to manage because I had to keep finding extra staff to translate this Englishman's English to non-native speakers...

We all suffered - he knew exactly what he was doing but in this politically correct world he gleefully asserted his pride in his local dialect and claimed discrimination if asked, for the sake of politeness, to moderate his speech in order to do his job properly. It was just bloody rude.

Sorry, that was really long!

It is incredibly important.

But A year or so ago she was swearing like a trooper- If she's picking that up from her father he needs to have a (grammatically correct) word with himself.

DD 10 knows the rules and sometimes chooses to break them. I think that's OK.

Wellthen would it be snobbery to correct your child if they kept saying 2+2=5, or kept misreading the time on a clock?

Ironically, what you are demonstrating is inverted snobbery. Deny it as much as you like, but people do judge if you use poor grammar.

I am not from the UK (which is why I may be missing something / cultural factors) but I believe that correcting grammatical errors is perfectly fine.

I wouldn't feel comfortable encouraging poor grammar. (I'm not a native English speaker, btw.)

Penelope mathematics doesn’t change, that’s the whole point. The difficulty, as some posters have said, with trying to apply very picky rules to language is that simply isn’t how language works. It evolves in order to allow humans to communicate.

I never said people don’t judge, in fact I explicitly said that I have been judged for being both too posh and too northern.

What is important is teaching our children to be adaptable and to understand where and when rules MUST be followed such as professional situations.

Correcting your dh in front of your children teaches them nothing but bad manners. Hence why my southern cousins thought it acceptable to tell me ‘you’re saying it wrong’ (forehead not forrid)

I'm glad my Mum corrected me as I grew up. We actually lived in several different parts of the country as I grew up, North and South, so I tended to pick up the local accent wherever I was at the time. She always made sure my grammar was correct though. I was able to switch between talking like a local with my friends and speaking "properly" with my parents and other adults.

Through my work in school, I have to say not being able to speak using correct grammar absolutely does have an impact on children's ability to use it in their writing. It does have an impact on their results. This is in an area without a particularly strong local accent/dialect. I can only imagine it is worse where it is stronger.

Well, if she says it as an adult people will think she's thick so it's for the best.

I am in South East London and don't talk like he does.

I say things how you would say them but I do think you are a snob, despite what you say.

My OH is broad Yorkshire says e.g. thy sen for yourself , he'd tell me quite rightly to fuck right off if i did this..

thy sen for yourself

You should see for yourself?