‘We was’

[StripeyNighty]

Arghhh, is it just me noticing SO many people now saying/ typing ‘we was?!’

I’m on so many FB baby groups and I swear every person on there says ‘we was in the living room’ ‘we was scared’ etc. It absolutely drives me insane, why is is it so prevalent all of a sudden?

‘Me’ instead of ‘my’ is a normal unstressed pronunciation. Nobody says ‘me’ when emphasising ownership. People say ‘This is my house’ when they feel the need to point that out but ‘where’s me hat?’ Is absolutely standard. It’s even taught in text books of English as a foreign language.

Op beat me to it - this has been annoying me for months on Mumsnet but never got round to creating a post about it.

Also people who mix up affect and effect.

I'm baffled that so many on this thread don't see that you fit your speech to who you are speaking with - it's a different tone and intention, not 'wrong grammar'.

Different tones and dialects are one thing, and regions dialects are to be celebrated imo. Even abbreviations like Y'all for You all are fine colloquially imo.

But grammatical mistakes are different. When people of whatever dialect make grammatical mistakes it sounds wrong and imo shows a lack of education of English.

My 3.5 year old's preschool teachers all say this, and so of course now he does too.. yep it irritates me!

I grew up saying ‘I aren’t’ but never ‘I weren’t’ or ‘we was’. Clearly these things are regional. How can you distinguish between regional dialect and grammatical mistakes without placing ‘we was’ in the dialect category?

There are elements of my speech that are correct even formally where I'm from (Haitch, gotten, the way I use bring and take) and are criticised as incorrect on here. Noticing that has made me much more tolerant of other regional variations, even if they sound odd to me.

Exactly.

Same with one I posted earlier in the thread.
I grew up saying and still do say, ‘I am/was sat’.

I am perfectly aware this is not correct. This is very common in the northwest- you don’t hear people doing it with other verbs (well except stand)

Oh you do hear "I seen" and "I done" in other English-speaking countries. In Northern Ireland it's a fairly common mistake (in both senses of the word).

A problem with this approach is that people sometimes see mistakes when there are none. They think the English they speak is the Standard, the only correct form.

People forget that there are forms of Standard English other than the one they speak. Mostly, people are aware of American English, but forget about Standard Scottish English or Hiberno English (Irish English), for example.

As @JenniferBarkley said, haitch is the standard form in Hiberno English. The verbs bring and take are used slightly differently than they are in British English. Yet, time and time again on MN, and again on this thread, people criticise their use as the mistakes of uneducated people. They are often not mistakes. If I say I brought something or took something and the context seems odd to you, please do not worry. I am using the correct, standard forms of the verbs in Hiberno-English.

I think it's fine to correct your children and to request they say aitch instead of haitch, but please do remember that people from other places will be making the opposite request of their children.

But to judge people for regional usage, dialect, slang in informal communication (whether in person or online) is out of line and demonstrates a complete lack of nuance.
And also this.

@RotundBeagle that's why we're called yam yams!

We am, yo am, ee am, yam yam yam yam yam.

DH still struggles with my DPs occasionally but after 20 years he's mostly figured it out.

Languages changes over time 🤷‍♀️ I think people would be foolish to think that what we see as “correct” will remain to be so. Look at medieval language! It’s like text speech, it’s becoming a language in and of itself. Same with emojis.

Prescriptivist bores who think pointing out other peoples mistakes makes them seem well educated just come across as unpleasant to be honest.

I believe you mean is it not, that reeeally fucking grates!

There’s ent, int, & ain’t.

I see almost everyone is now is desperately trying to be grammatically correct 😆

I don't really understand your reply. I've never actually heard anyone say ent or int, I was querying whether they were different words.
Guess they are...
Don't know what I said to grate on you so much, but I don't particularly care either 😂

If I say I brought something or took something and the context seems odd to you, please do not worry. I am using the correct, standard forms of the verbs in Hiberno-English.

Interesting. Could you possibly give an example of this? I'm intrigued.

I haven't RTFT but "anythink" makes me rage

OOwurrywe? Wurrywe issen?
This is Derbyshire for
Who was he with? Was he by himself?

It’s not. Think about how certain Londoners speak.

Do you mean colloquial?

From Wikipedia's article on Hiberno-English:

Bring and take: Irish use of these words differs from that of British English because it follows the Irish grammar for beir and tóg. English usage is determined by direction; a person determines Irish usage. So, in English, one takes "from here to there", and brings it "to here from there". In Irish, a person takes only when accepting a transfer of possession of the object from someone else – and a person brings at all other times, irrespective of direction (to or from).

It’s also interesting that you class ‘you all’ or ‘y’all’ as used in the southern states of America as dialect rather than a grammatical mistake.
What about when ‘you all’ is used to address, and to mean, only two people? What about expressions such as ‘some of you all’ and ‘all of you all’?
The thing is a dialect that doesn’t diverge from standard grammar in some ways doesn’t deserve the name dialect.

I guess it's meant that a dialect is a way of pronouncing words. The grammar is not affected.

And the example of y'all or I'm are actually contractions, I think.

The thing is a dialect that doesn’t diverge from standard grammar in some ways doesn’t deserve the name dialect.

I guess I never saw it that way.

Dialects exist in all languages and imo are just different ways of pronouncing words. So a New York accent is different to an Essex accent, and a Bavarian accent is different to a Berlin accent etc

But none of the accents or dialects affect the grammar. Imo.

Another quote, this time from 'The Irish Times' @Reddahlias, about an Irish reader's struggles with language difference while living in London.

Another vexed issue...is the Irish use of the verb “to bring”...“we bring things away, they take them.” And the misunderstanding is only exacerbated when we speak of bringing things “home”, by which we don’t necessarily mean our home.

In fact, another e-mailer has shared a related story about a friend’s aunt who also worked in London, in a nursery school. One evening, at closing time, a solitary inmate remained uncollected. So naturally, the Irishwoman offered to “bring” the child “home”. And just as naturally, the English staff were appalled at her offer, until the nuances were explained.

(Would using 'home' in that sense cause confusion? I don't know.)

Interesting @LizzieAnt I didn't know that about the Irish meaning of bring (and home).