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?

You've said what I was trying to say but better. Cheers! 😁

I had a different type of sound problem where I had a bad list because of high frequency hearing loss, and had speech therapy as a child to correct it. Before this, i actually had no idea that the letter 's' was a separate sound (obviously I knew it was a letter and in words), so I always pronounced words like "house" as "houth". Of course, during speech therapy I was taught how to put my tongue against the top of my gums on the roof of my mouth to say "s", and progressed from saying "tssss" to "s" this way. I also clearly remember the speech therapist showing me diagrams of the tongue position for pronouncing the "th" sound and it had never occurred to me just where my tongue needed to be for all these sounds.

It was actually pretty fascinating learning how sounds are formed and phonetics, and I think my letter pronunciation of "s" is fairly natural now as I have been able to do it naturally out of habit once I knew where to put my tongue.

But as I can't physically hear the letter "s" sound frequency, to me that actual sound doesn't exist. Which sounds odd but is the sole reason I never knew how to pronounce it...😳😅

Bad lisp not "list" 😳🙄

I get this! My son is Arthur but the amount of people who call him Arffffur drives me mad

My son's name is Bjorn (which the Danish oe sound which this English key baord doesn't do). I don't assume everyone who mispronouces it are lazy idiots though.

It’s interesting to hear that SLTs now see this as just cosmetic. My three year old confuses f and th and it means at the moment that he can’t say whether eg thumb starts with “f” or “th”. I’m not concerned as he’s only 3, but can imagine that for school age children this kind of speech impediment has the potential to make learning phonics a bit more difficult. I’m surprised therefore to read that it’s not something a SLT would help with.

People say that they can’t hear the difference, but they know how a word is spelled.

@Flossflower do you mean like "phonics," which was the example the OP gave as the reason she wanted to reject a teacher for this appalling crime? Maybe the teacher didn't get the job. Or maybe other members of the interviewing panel detected her other fine qualities as an educator and overruled OP's opinion.

It's not modern, people spoke like that in the early 1980s.

I can still remember having frustrating conversation, in about 1981, with a friend when I was about six years old and got a big girl bike for my birthday. My little kid bike had been a fixed wheel affair so you couldn't stop pedalling. On the new one you could "free wheel" - stop pedalling and the wheels still went round.

-It's a free-wheeler.
-No it isn't, it has two wheels!
-No, a feh reh eh eh FREE wheeler.
-It has two wheels!

...etc

Definitely an English thing, although a lot of Irish cant pronounce the TH and say DE,instead of the, and dose instead of those....drives me nuts.

And Not pronouncing H as “aitch” and instead saying “haitch”drives me insane

Doesn't bother me - I hear it around here a lot and my brain does register it (I'd bloody expect it to since I'm a SALT) but if it's a dialect thing rather than an issue being able to articulate the sound - general view is to let it be (I don't work with kids though so we generally have bigger issues to work on).

If you're only dropping t/g/h you're doing East Midlands wrong - the correct pronunciation of Ilkeston is to just drop all the sounds out of it until it becomes a "Ilbleurgh" kind of noise.

Hello! I'm a phonetician and accent specialist. I've written books about English pronunciation, it's regional variants and how accent is used to oppress those from lower socio-economic backgrounds. I've spent years researching and analysing accents of the UK.

It's so funny to me how the phrase 'The Queens English' is used to arbitrarily define a 'correct' way to talk, when lovely Liz herself evolved her speech system over the years - just listen to the Queen's speech in the 50's versus the noughties. Did you know speech was only standardised in a dictionary of Received Pronunciation in 1869? And then it was based on the speech patterns of the elite in the South, where we have our capital and centre of political power (at least at the time...!).

The reality is this 'PROPAH' speech exists only due to a series of invasions and marriages and reeks of the desperation of historical social climbing. No one cared about accent before people could escape their class.

Accents move and shift and they always, always will. There is no 'correct' when it comes to speech UNLESS meaning is lost. Swapping a TH for an F now and again will not likely make you misunderstood, whereas swapping an L for an X would be pretty tricky.

Please, PLEASE try and understand how accent is muscular. If I asked you right now to do the splits/a backflip - could you do it (anyone saying 'yes' I am v jealous!)? If the answer is 'no' that is the level of muscular shift you are asking a person to make to change a lifetime of swapping any speech sound for another. It's literal oral gymnastics. If I asked those of you who hate the F swap to do it for a whole day, how would you find it. It's really hard!!

Try and be tolerant. I realise this is a pointless plea to many, but try! These are just regional accents, they are not incorrect speech.

Incidentally, the next future evolution of Global English is merging into an international sound anyway. We now have a world where English is a common language for many speakers of different languages, so they communicate through English. This means "mispronunciations" are being cemented across speakers and countries. English speakers are starting to find themselves reinforcing these mispronunciations in the name of speed (think different stresses/over-pronouncing unstressed syllables) and these will become the norm.

Accents are a form of spoken oral history. We mustn't judge them (yes, even when the speaker is a teacher).

True. I speak Spanish and can be easily understood in Spain or Spanish-speaking countries even though I cannot roll my Rs. No matter how hard I try, I can't do it because I am an English English speaker. I wonder if Scottish people, with rhotic pronunciation, find that easier.

Oooh - fun accent test. People who are obsessed with speaking 'properly' will SWEAR they don't do this, but they absolutely do (unless they talk permanently like actors in a Noel Coward film).

Ask them to say 'vodka and tonic'.

In British English we insert a little R sound between the end of vodka and start of and:

Vodka-ran(d)-tonic (d generally not released because it assimilates in speech with T).

It drives people mad to know that 'correct' connected spoken speech includes sound insertion. I love showing people this. Generally highlights how unaware people are about speech.

Don't say that out loud in parts of Ireland. Saying "haitch" is acceptable pronunciation, especially in some communities, and English people (if that is what you are) declaring that it's wrong is a sure-fire way of getting their backs up.

Wouldn't be a cause for concern at that age regardless - voiced and unvoiced th (I'm not trying to type the IPA for it on here!) are the last sounds to be typically acquired at late infant type age.

Also a huge movement within SLT to make sure that an individual's speech community and their home accent/dialect are not devalued in some kind of push to make everyone go back to trying to sound like they've escaped a BBC broadcast from the 1950s. If the home environment all use f/v and the child is aware that fish does not start with the same phoneme as thin - would not be flagging many causes for concern, even if it is driving you as a parent mildly mad.

Mind you - the mess NHS paeds SLT is in - you'll be lucky to get much of anything! (I work with adults!)

Brilliant

I don't think SaLTs do see it as cosmetic, but they work with disruptions to the spoken (not written) communication chain.
/f/ /v/ substitution is not a breakdown in communication and therefore wouldn't meet the NHS threshold. Remember spelling uses the visual as well as auditory route.
A private speech therapist could probably sort it in a couple of sessions for most (but not all children) if the parent wanted it sorted, just the same with a lisp, or other minor speech 'errors' (using the term 'error' very loosely here).

It's not that Irish people 'can't pronounce' 'th'. They DO pronounce it. They just pronounce it 'dh'.

Some of the shite people are spouting on this thread verges on out and out racism.

👏

There's your answer @Guiltridden12345 Or have you left so noone interferes with your judgement?

You actually asked someone with a speech impediment to explain why they have it…? Would you ask someone unable to walk and in a wheelchair why their legs don’t work? The idiocy and entitlement of some people never fail to astound me.

Ooooh squeals with geeky delight here! I bloody miss phonetics so damned much... and sociolinguistics! Phonetics made most people cry but I bloody loved it.

The other bit is that human connected speech is a whole glorious hodge hodge of your articulators taking all kinds of short cuts to jump to the next sound and clock off the one they're on early.

And if you're ever wanting to be fascinated - look up the videos of beatboxing in an MRI scanner - it's fucking amazing what goes on inside your head!

I don't know one single person that does this.
I've overheard teens doing it. Assuming they think it makes themselves sound cool.

I’m a cockney. This is my reality and my voice and I’ll use it how I like :)

I for one am super annoyed that people no longer seem to be able to pronounce the “k” and “gh” in “Knight” and instead go with this “nite” nonsense!

It is just laziness, or an affectation of the young perhaps. If it is good enough for Chaucer though it is good enough for me, so I am taking a stand against the dumbing down of our language!