Teacher dialect

[MaverickGooseGoose]

No doubt I'll make a mistake on this, Sod's Law and all that...

All the SLT and from what I've heard a lot of the teachers speak is sard east London dialect.

Free / three / roof / ruth / we was etc.

It's grating on me, if Roof was on the roof and needed free pounds to get off but her mum was coming to get her where was she going?

I understand dialect / colloquialisms but some of what they say/write doesn't make sense.

Anyone else as irritated as me? It's the same
on the radio now, the guy on capital is giving away free fousand pounds for free. Argh.

Scots is a language in its own right, not a dialect or an accent. Scots isn’t just slang.

It's awful! And unless there is a speech impediment (which obviously is very different) then there is no excuse!

'Yous' and 'et' being used as actual words by supposedly intelligent people eeeeek! And children hear them so often that they think they are real words!

Irish people over compensate on the th sound. Genteel overcorrection I think it's called.

Eg , I trained myself to say Thames as I thought correctly. ' Thaymz' I would say smugly. But most Londoners just call it the Tems.

It's painful to hear Irish media types trying not to pronounce R though. I'm hopelessly prejudiced in favour of poor old R. Like the glottal stop : it must be harder to suppress a natural sound? You have to close off yer airways.

Also hate this! Haitch for hotel is more logical I feel but it is just WRONG and people do it alllllll the time.

@Abhannmor
Oh, when do Irish media types try not to pronounce R? I haven't noticed that.

@mamnotmum Whether haitch is wrong or not depends on where you live it seems. It's correct where I am.

Oh I'm hearing it more and more. Might be part of a wider shift though. But there is more than one strand to it. Valley Girl on the one hand and S.E. English on the other.

I remember Emer O Kelly saying the default accent for broadcasting was that of the Dublin bourgeoisie. That is in flux now.

then there is no excuse!

of course there is. It's called an accent. Do you also think there's "no excuse" for people who do/don't pronounce the Rs in words (depending on whether you do or not)?

Thanks @Abhannmor, maybe it is part of a wider shift. For example, I say tree for three and so does DH - but DS says three. We still live where I grew up so how did that happen?

Too much tv and youtube probably!😅

I hadn't noticed the r thing though. I'll keep an ear out, thanks.

It would be the same as telling a child from Yorkshire that it's "bahth", not "bath"

DS1 (6) has a standard Southern accent/I suppose RP accent for everything apart from the words "grass" and "bath" thanks to his reception teacher. He absolutely loved her so I hope he keeps that little quirk :)

Accents are one thing, not speaking standard English is entirely different. It would bother me a lot. I'm a teacher in the SE and until we moved here I'd never seen anyone muddle our and are or fill and feel.

I'm from NW England. I couldn't pronounce a hard "th" sound until I was ten. A teacher took the piss out of me in front of the whole class, the first time anyone had drawn attention to it. It was 1980; he was a twat; I felt humiliated by it, and rightly or wrongly I made up my mind not to go through that again. It was bloody hard to train myself to make the sound, so I understand people's difficulty with it. I managed it though, I think just to prove that I could do it.

Free for three is not local dialect or accent! It's a common mispronunciation and occurs all over the country in young children. It's just that in some people it is corrected through education, and in others it isn't (especially if their parents also have the same mis-pronunciation). You rarely hear anyone who has reached a high standard of education and literacy say free for the number three.

Yes, it's an accent. It's ignorant to try and argue otherwise. Just like it would be ignorant to correct other regional pronunciations.

Ok, and exactly where is it a regional accent from? I hear it everywhere, not specific to a region.

I'm Yorkshire and quite a lot of people pronounce 'thr' as 'f' but not everyone by a long way and generally not older people. It only tends to be younger people. My parents are as working class as they get and have strong a Yorkshire accent and use a lot of dialect words but they don't mis-pronounce letter strings. I work in a Primary School in West Yorkshire and non of the staff speak like this and children will be corrected if they do because it's not accepted as just 'accent', but mis-pronunciation here.

It's definitely thought of as a trait of the uneducated.

It is south east. (See earlier post on Finglesham.) If it's spread elsewhere that's probably due to TV. It can be found, I think, in Dickens, along with "w" for "v".
I once lost my patience wiv an 'all full of pupils oose pronunciation of "Oh Li''le town of Befle'em" was appalling, and modelled back at vem what vey sounded like, explaining that for performance, it was necessary to change what sounds they used, and modelled the "correct" version. It worked, but it's necessary not to trash children's parents, who do use the local accent, which it is.
I also once tried with one girl who found it very very difficult to sound "th" sounds. In fact, impossible. She could not hear "th". She could not see the difference between tongue on upper teeth and upper teef on lower lip, even wiv a mirror to compare her mouth wiv mine. This is parallel to other languages which do not use "l" sounds, for example. Babies grow up learning to use sounds around them, and abandon sounds which are not used.
There was a programme a few years ago which had items which struck me strongly. A woman with a strong RP accent, clearly associated with what most of us would regard as the upper class, was criticising a BBC newsreader, a woman with a mild Edinburgh accent, as being incomprehensible. (I can't recall the name, sadly, but it was not a person I have ever found difficult to understand.)
The other item was from a broadcaster, again a woman, with a very strong London accent. I can hear it in my head now, but the name is currently escaping me. She has not only been criticised for her accent but physically taunted for it by people with Sloane versions of "upper class" English.
It seems odd to me how intense the reactions can be to people whose speech varies from RP. It can go in either direction, criticising supposed "lazy" speech. but also contempt for the posh.
What people are saying is more important than how they are saying it, so long as the meaning can be understood.

You'd have hated my grammar school! All the teachers had broad Northern Irish accents and as a result my German, French and Spanish is accented, a NI version of those languages despite my best efforts...

Unfortunately in the SE where we are now, it's the dialect. Particularly with younger teachers. My kids haven't picked it up, probably because our at home accents aren't English but lots of their friends have much to the annoyance of some parents!

It's a London Dialect.

It's a regional accent from South London, @FancyFanny. Hence 'Sarf' London being used locally as a jokey way to describe the area.
Not for 'the uneducated' FFS!

If it’s a “London accent” why do many people I know - in Scotland” do it?

There’s a lot of working class teachers knocking about these days. I should know, I’m one of them. It’s a good thing. Schools for far, far too long have just catered to the middle classes. Now I’m not saying teachers should dumb themselves down, but they should be allowed to be themselves too. I have struggled with that in the past but now I embrace it 😜. It is okay to be from a working class background but also highly educated (first degree with masters etc). If you are in a school which serves a predominantly working class demographic then walking around talking like Mary Poppins won’t give the desired effect.

I dont know , but it is most definitely part of the London Dialect

"Th-fronting is a prominent feature of several dialects of English, notably Cockney, Essex dialect, Estuary English, some West Country and Yorkshire dialects, African American Vernacular English, and Liberian English, as well as in many non-native English speakers (e.g. Hong Kong English, though the details differ among those accents).[2]"

I don't see how pronouncing words the correct way (and 'th' does not make an 'f' sound) is talking like Mary Poppins. I'm an East Londoner so my accent isn't remotely posh but I do speak properly.

Interestingly, from the same page you quoted:

Th-fronting in the speech of working-class adolescents in Glasgow was reported in 1998, provoking public as well as academic interest. The finding of th-fronting in Glaswegian creates a difficulty for models of language change which hinge on dialect contact associated with geographical mobility since the Glaswegian speakers who used [f] most in the 1997 sample are also those with the lowest geographical mobility. In addition, th-fronting was reported as "a relatively new phenomenon" in Edinburgh in March 2013.[15]

So in other words, it’s an accent in London, but a class thing in Glasgow?

My Glaswegian daughter does this, as does her dad. We are both from working class backgrounds although I guess we are now probably seen as upper working/lower middle class (teacher and skilled service industry)