Dropping her T’s

[Stick0rTwist]

My daughter has just gone into Yr1 and is an articulate child, relatively smart with a love for reading.

We moved her to a new school in the new year and have noticed since then she has started dropping her t’s when saying many of her words, like water, better, bottle, little etc.

This gets corrected consistently at home as although we don’t speak the queens English (and are not snobbish by any stretch of the imagination) we would prefer her to speak properly and not get into bad habits speech wise.

Over the summer holidays she was fine, but I’ve noticed in the two days she’s been back her speech has reverted back.

So here’s the AIBU - would I be unreasonable to mention this to her teacher? Or would I sound like a massive snob 🙈

Sounds dramatic but it’s even making me want to move her school again as this was not a problem at her old school at all. Its been a direct result of moving school as it started the week we moved.

Yes. I l love them all. I live near Glasgow, one of my favourite colleagues was Geordie and one of my neighbours is Liverpudlian.

english with Yorkshire accent is fine but for me, slang is too far. Owt and nowt are Yorkshire slang - my personal issue is the shortening or words and phrases used rather than an accent itself. In the same way I would dress appropriately for the occasion, I think speech should be appropriate depending my on the setting. No use of slang words/terms in classrooms. I would happily say cuppa if casually speaking to a friend or at home with family but if out, I’d order a cup of tea. I don’t think it makes me a snob.

It doesn't suggest anything of the sort and I didn't say that. However, I would ask them to slow down a bit if it was so fast I couldn't grasp what they were saying. Perfectly normal interactions!

I’m flummoxed that so many posters think it’s ‘snobby’ to pronounce a ‘t’ in the middle of a word! 😨

Do you genuinely not understand what's being said?

No one thinks it's snobby to pronounce a 't' in the middle of a word, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Some posters think it is snobby to judge people who don't pronounce a 't' in the middle of a word, or to correct a child who doesn't pronounce a 't' in the middle of the word. The reason they think it's snobby is because it is.

My mum still tells me off if I don’t say my Ts properly. I am 44.

I do not tolerate improper use of language so I’d be sternly correcting each time and issuing consequences if it didn’t improve. That sounds snobbish but I truly don’t care. I flinch at dropped letters and worse, anyone who says ‘haitch’ 😬 communication is so important.

No, it’s not. It’s correct.

It's correct to judge people for how they say 't'?

My mum still tells me off if I don’t say my Ts properly. I am 44
Quite right of her! 😆 🤣

i quite like an Irish accent but was confused when someone was telling me about the bords in her garden.

Possibly some rhotic vs non-rhotic confusion going on there @CrostaDiPizza?

@Differentforgirls , You're not reading it correctly.

@Yellowlife , she meant the birds in the garden. I was wondering why she was saying she liked looking at the boards in the garden.

No it's not. It's correct in some dialects and accents, not in others.

What?

Yes, I guessed it was birds. I’m Irish and I don’t know anyone who pronounces birds as boards, but perhaps some accents do.

Often when I’m listening to an English accent on television ( BBC type accent) I pick up the meaning of the word from the context too. If a word is said in isolation (eg birds) I may not understand it. So that sort of thing does work both ways.

The BBC type English accent is not always a terribly easy accent to follow when you have a rhotic accent yourself. For example I only learned from MN that Shaun the sheep was meant to be a pun. That would never have occurred to me in a million years!😄

Because we get deeply tired of anti-Irishness, and it's still alive and well, as frequently demonstrated on Mn threads to do with Irish names and Hiberno-English.

There is, for instance, no such thing as an 'Irish accent', any more than the late Queen shared an accent with Danny Dyer by virtue of them both being English.

A working-class, inner-city Dublin accent might pronounce 'birds' as 'boards', just as certain regional accents in England use 'th-fronting', ie pronouncing 'th' as 'f'.

However, like most people, I have enough contextual intelligence to know that if someone who speaks, say, Estuary English says 'I fink', he or she does not mean that they are strikebreakers or police informers.

It's really not that hard.

What if a London parent had complained about my pronunciation of fast, last, up, but, cup, etc? Should I have been instructed to pronounce them like a Londoner?

Owt and nowt are widely used in Yorkshire. I don’t consider them ‘slang’ they are part of the local vocabulary.

I used them in the classroom for 30 years. Still got outstanding results. Still managed to get students into university.

I'm a literacy specialist and this is something that comes up regularly in phonics teaching, particularly in Early Years and KS1. As discussed on this thread, some English phonemes sound very different depending on the regional accent. The general agreed approach is for the teacher to teach the children the phonemes as they would be pronounced in the local regional accent, so for example the Yorkshire teacher would teach the phoneme in 'bath' as /ɑː/ during phonics, but would use their own regional pronunciation in other teaching. Sometimes the difference is very significant - I worked with one teacher in England who had a strong Derry accent, so when teaching children a word like 'our' he would explicitly demonstrate the two pronunciations, 'I say x, you say y.'

Teachers with rhotic accents can be a godsend in phonics teaching in England!

I appreciate you answering instead of me @AncientHarpy, thank you. I agree with what you say.

You aren’t actually The Great Arbiter of Undisputable Truth, despite your dogmatic assertion.

Guess what. I don’t think it’s ‘snobby’ to notice dropping ‘T’s. And my thought is just as valid as yours. The fact is I don’t care about judging what is ‘snobby’. I judge that policing others for potential ‘snobiness’ is chippy as fuck, intrusive, and time to get a life.

Wow. Calm down.

I was a secondary English teacher, though. Should I have been instructed to (try to) mimic local pronunciation if a parent complained?