To hate the modern trend of replacing ‘th’ with ‘v’ or ‘f’?

[Guiltridden12345]

It’s everywhere. All age groups from middle age downwards (not heard in older people yet). My child’s teachers (primary and secondary), presenters on tv and radio, my kids trying to adopt it from their mates. Not cockney or accent related (ie like a Nottingham accent that does replace th with f a lot), just pan regional sloppy speech that seems to have caught on. I fink, I fort, bruvver, uvver. Why?

Wow, I had no idea it was so common to have issues with hearing the difference between/pronouncing f & th! I've always felt like my speech issues make me stick out like a sore thumb, although I've developed coping strategies over the years. E.g most people aren't aware that I have a stutter as I know exactly which words/combos to avoid, although anyone that has seen me very tired or extremely stressed knows!

*I’d hate.

Looks like I can type as well as I can speak 😂

It seems to be across the board along with using likely incorrectly; I’ll likely be slated for that one 😂 I wonder how anybody learns to spell if they can’t speak correctly, for example “their cumin’’ t’ are ‘ouse” instead of “they’re coming to our house!”

People with a stutter definitely get mocked and ridiculed unfortunately. I once worked with an idiot who thought our deaf trainers voice was hilarious too.

It’s all wrong.

Timofy lives in Baff me lover. Gurt lush e is.

What really annoys me is people who get in a tizzy about how a person speaks. I grew up in Norfolk, one parent comes from posh London, t'other came from cockney London. Therefore I was doomed from the start. Do you know how difficult it is to fit in with a 'different' accent?
As far as I'm concerned uniformity on TV and radio, when it comes to speaking, should continue to be buried in a big hole and forgotten.

I grew up with speech difficulties. Got some help from the NHS but not enough to combat it all. Luckily we had a family friend who had previously worked in helping with speech issues so was able to help whilst I was still in primary school. I imagine a lot of people aren't so fortunate to have that assistance. I mainly struggled with 'th' sounds and 'r' sounds plus clarity of speech. The latter still is an issue but much improved. It doesn't help that often you don't recognise these things until they improve. I was lucky to be taught some good techniques on how to pronounce these sounds that didn't come naturally when I was a lot younger and more malleable. They can often be learnt but it takes practice and having someone teach you them. Poetry often works well as it has a rhythm to it which helps practice.

Another who hates it, think I've heard it described as the 'London accent'? I would guess it's growing in popularity because the media seems to love it, most voiceovers and adverts seem to use it now - immediately puts me off the product tbh. I don't think it's just a regional accent variation as people from completely different areas with totally different traditional accents seem to have adopted it much in the same way once upon a time they might have adopted RP. There are even some people who I strongly suspect have deliberately adopted it to further their career, naming no names! I would add that if somebody spoke fine but couldn't pronounce 'th' I would assume they had a mild impediment and certainly wouldn't sneer or judge.

I second the person from Nottingham saying it’s not a Midland’s dialect. I’m from West Midlands and we would happily drop our h’s but not t’s. Vowels are elongated etc

I think you are thinking of Essex. I currently live South Coast ish and there is a lot of t/th dropping here as it’s a cross between a West Country sound and a cockney sound.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting

It's really common... get ready to be bored 🥱...
When we learn a to speak the brain has to do some incredibly complex neural network building, it's one of the reason speech can take up to 5 years to stabilise and development (language even longer as that's even more incredibly complex, and in fact the human brain has this extraordinary ability to keep on learning language).
So we learn each and every sound (called a phoneme and not the same as letters). Each sound is made up of three characteristics: place, manner and voicing. I don't have the IPA (international Phonetic Alphabet) on my computer so I'll try and do it with with 'letters' but remember it's a sound!
/f/ is called a labial-dental (lip behind teeth) fricative (airstream) voiceless (silent) sound. /v/ is also a labial-dental, fricative but it's voiced (not silent!) sound.
/th/ is a dental sound, its also a fricative and just like a /f/ and /v/, /th/ can be voiceless or voiced.
So the difference between these sounds is the placement ie lips to teeeth, to tongue to teeth, And it's a teeny tiny adjustment. Because of this very subtle difference some babies and young children can't tell the difference, this could be down to hearing or auditory processing (slightly different from hearing).
So that's the input side of things, in other words listening, and creating a neural map of the sound. Next is copying the sound, the brain now has to create a new pathway to replicate the sound, this becomes a speech sound, or output. Sometimes things get in the way of producing the sound (immature articulators for example, articulators just part of the speech mechanism ie tongues, lips etc;), so now a new map is laid down, but if it's been laid down with just one tinsy error this error becomes the established speech sound.
Now here is the really, really, really awesome bit....from 0-5 years (approximately) we do this with Every.Single.speech sound in our native tongue...how awesome is that...isn't the brain cool?!
So, yes sometimes speech sounds aren't always as precise as we might like them to be...but actually providing communication isn't interrupted it doesn't matter. It's nitpicking and pompous to assume there is only one way to speak!
It's a problem if the communication chain is interrupted, but that's a totally different issue.

For goodness sake, the OP is talking about slang - not speech impediments.

Pretty easily... some of that's just accent
Example being bottom o'th' moor
I know what it stands for and how to spell it but it's the right way to pronounce the road name!
Still managed an A* in English language despite growing up with the northern slang and accent

I fink, I fort, bruvver, uvver

I'm Irish so for me these would be
I tink, I taut, brudder, udder

I'm not used to making the TH sound at all, just tried it and it feels so unnatural on my tongue and like a lot of effort, but saying F instead is a lot easier and more natural. They also sound very similar when I listen to myself, the F sounds better as the TH sounds makes me sound like I have a lisp.

DH has speech impediment and unable to pronounce 'th' replaces with 'f'. Quite self conscious about it.

as crabby so brilliantly explained a few posts above it’s not slang it’s not having ever learnt the phoneme for “th” and so using “f”. It’s really hard if not impossible to then learn a correct phoneme in later life and would need speech therapy to learn the physical placement of tongue/mouth/lips as you no longer will be capable of picking it up organically like a baby does. So if like me your mother (or primary caregiver)did not use the “th” phoneme (as she is cockney/Essex) then you won’t be able to make that sound- it’s not choosing to be lazy

I don't hear too much of this in person, yes to on TV, but I do live in the North East. I hear a lot more of "scuwell" instead of "school" so changing o's to u's eg. "book" becomes "buck", "cookie" becomes "cuckie", I can't really talk though because I have the a really werid accent. Think Scottish, Geordie mixed with some Yorkshire tang, and Bavarian/German (which is mostly hidden until I have a drink!)
I have to actively think about every word I say when I am in my workplace, to try and pronounce it clearly and "properly"

Incidentally, this isn't just happening in the UK. My family in Germany say language is becoming lazy over there too. There's a big difference in how my Grandad speaks to my cousins.

It's difficult to get worked up about this one particular dialect / speech sounds when the UK is so very varied with it. Most of us round 'ere don' pronounce our 't's or 'h's but we when to use them in spelling. Dropping letters doesn't make you inherently unable to spell standard English.

In other words, why you bovvered?

I'm from East London and with respect, I think you just sound like a snob. I have a professional job and when I was younger I would always make a huge effort to pronounce things differently for fear of being judged. It was exhausting and I don't do it now. Maybe others feel similarly and that's what you're noticing.

How do you pronounce book and cookie if not buck and cuckie?
😅

It's people who say 'somethink' 'everythink' etc instead of saying 'something' 'everything' that bug me. I just don't get why it's seemingly so difficult to pronounce the words correctly. It's not a new thing, obviously, but I cringe inside every time I hear somebody putting a 'k' at the end of words where they don't belong. I realise it's my issue and it does make me seem annoying, but it's just the way I'm wired, I guess.

I don’t mind sounding like a snob in relation to what I would call ‘sloppy’ speech. A colleague who trained in a profession at a large business at the same time as me was taken aside and taught how to Speak ‘properly’. Clients demanded a certain level of accuracy. Many accents, so it wasn’t a regional accents issue, it was the dropping of consonants etc so about technically inaccurate speech. Whatever the reason, sounding th as an f is technically wrong. I understand now some people have a genuine impediment but as a pp said, and I’ll think more before I judge as a result, what I’m talking about is widespread slang, not speech impediments .

ultimately, in jobs and professional roles, you will be judged by how you speak. Doesn’t make you a better lawyer/doctor/accountant/architect but it may jar with people (clients) if it’s just an affectation rather than an issue.

interestingly, they now teach the f and th difference in SATs etc, and it’s in the year 2 SATs paper. I was bemused by this at the time but the teaching of ‘sounds’ (thanks for that lesson pp!) is obviously important at a set age. If parents don’t correct speech of small kids, would this corrective action at a young age help? My child couldn’t say her L, she said Y til 3/4, and over a few days we taught her where to put her tongue and how to say it properly. Didn’t take long to correct a lifelong (3/4 year) mispronunciation. Had she got to 5, and school, and it was still Y for L, would that then have been set for life? If that’s the case, is this (correcting speech sounds) something parents and carers should be doing with much smaller children? I thought the Y for L was so cute for ages, and only when she was approaching school did I think ‘maybe we just need to teach her where to put her tongue?’

I voted YABU cause even though I dislike it it's not new!

Estuary English isn't it! I blame Jamie Oliver (actually I really like his programmes but his diction sucks!)