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.

I remember the head of my primary school tearing a strip off children who sang “fam-er-ly” in a song which had the line “cause we’re all one family”.

Apostrophes are definitely used when you’re writing plurals of lowercase letters. ‘Mind your p’s and q’s’ is used rather than ‘Mind your ps and qs’.
It’s easier to read that way.

I’m not sure about uppercase letters, but the ‘clarity rule’ still holds for at least some letters.
The meaning of M’s is clearer with the apostrophe, for example.

I also got laughed at at secondary school for saying “for Pete’s sake”, like they do in Thunderbirds, which was first broadcast a whopping twenty years before I was born.

There are so many pages in this thread and I haven’t read them but I agree with you. It’s important to correct this and I mention it to the school, I wouldn’t be bothered about sounding “snobby”, it’s my kids future and they need to be able to speak properly. I’d liken it to correcting “was you”.

Just don’t. Kids copy other kids and she’ll speak like the majority of children she spends time with. Mine acquired a regional accent within weeks of moving.

This. Like it or not, accent and dialect are still class markers.

Ironically, my 6 year old son corrects me when I drop my Ts. He attends a private school in the south of England though (and I'm a Brummie).

Please do not contact the teacher about it. This really isn't her job. Over time, your child will pick up all sorts of things from her peers at school (and teachers too - some teachers drop their Ts as well remember!) and this will be the least of your worries. Just reiterate at home so she understands 'correct' pronunciations. As another poster has mentioned, children learn to code switch (but only if they are exposed to the different 'codes' in the first place!). Audiobooks are good to help with this (but listen to them first to make sure you're happy with them!).

Really? It's not a teacher's job to be able to reinforce this with 30 plus pupils.

Personally, I didn't pick up the local accent as I had been so ingrained with mine from my parents and travelling but my siblings did.

It just happens naturally. You can correct it at home but please don't expect a teacher to intervene. Pronunciation is taught but can you imagine trying to ensure they all speak immaculately at all times???

That's really interesting (and explains why my son pronounces bath with an 'ar' sound rather than like me with a flat 'a'!).

This is a good point. I've had speech therapy for a lisp as a young child, and before i had the therapy, I had no idea that the tongue placement for the letter 's' was behind the top front.teeth. I thought the sound obviously didnt exist as i couldn't hear it, so it was fascinating to see diagrams of tongue placement and how to form the letter from using the "t" sound tongue placement, and then bringing it to form the sound "ttsss" and eventually evolving to say "tsssh" and then "s".

Obviously i would never had learned this without speech therapy, but it is important to know letter tongue placement for good enunciation and sound articulation. I've been able to pronounce the letter "s" properly now but I remember as a child calling a boy's surname wrong in my class - I didn't realise his surname was "Culverhouse" so pronounced it with a "th" sound at the end 😅

I’ve come to realise that some MNetters seem to believe that all children are taught the exact same phoneme sounds in words, local accent notwithstanding. I remember on a previous thread a pp being most surprised that Scottish and Irish children were taught to pronounce ‘er’ and ‘ar’ with a rhotic accent. I think she imagined that they were all taught the same non-rhotic pronunciation as her children were, but later somehow deviated from that and got it ‘wrong’.

Maybe she wants to just 'fit in' with the crowd & not be called out by her peers, or worse, get bullied. It will pass, in time. Not today, but in time. Not the hill on which to make her stand out as different - sad as that may be to yourself?. Is it just at school / with her peers? My friends now (36) year old son, now a lawyer, went through a phase of the 'innit' type speech when at school - just to fit in. Let it go - making a big thing about it would just make it worse. xx (Unfortunately, yes, but kids just want to fit in).

Is it like British dropping Ts like wo-her (water) or more American softening Waa-der if the latter I would imagine tv/social media

I am so surprised that you’re getting such a hard time on here for posting this - it sounds like a perfectly reasonable question to ask help with. I am not British but we lived in London for a few years. My DD came back from school one day early in YR1 and said bu-on and I corrected her and said she can’t drop her t’s because when we move again no one will understand her. That ended the t-situation, but she also befriended a couple of other international kids, which may have helped. Anyway, if it’s not how you speak, I understand that you’d prefer your child to pronounce their T’s. What an outrageous overreaction you have faced here!

Most people I know end up talking like their parents, so if you keep speaking with Ts she should be OK!

These days, if my teen DS talks when out of the room, I often think he's my DH at first.

We all alter our speech to a greater or lesser extent when talking to others. Your daughter is trying to fit in with her new friends. It would be irresponsible of you to try to interfere with this process as she might end up isolated.
It took my son approximately a week to lose his Yorkshire accent when we moved South.

The teacher has 30 kids to teach. I can 100% guarantee that they will not be remotely interested in children dropping their Ts.

A reminder, there's no such thing as "speaking properly"- and it's particularly crass and classless to try to force such comparisons between regional accents and dialects. At best, the original comment sounds like it was composed by Hyacinth Bucket, but with less self awareness and no desire to be useful. Poor old Hyacinth, doomed always to be a wannabe who wishes she had something to be snobbish about, sailing through life oblivious to the sniggering behind her back.

Parochial posturing is often seen in those who desperately want to scrabble up the social ladder, but it's one thing to be an uninformed tryhard, and it's quite another to double down when repeatedly educated on the topic.

The question naturally arises, is there an element of racism in this posturing?Certainly, there's not much going on intellectually or by way of self reflection in the ridiculous notion that your own personal dialectical quirks are more "proper" than others.

So, to sum up, attempting to belittle and devalue linguistic diversity and insisting that it is improper for others to speak differently to your own preferred subset of English language speakers makes Hyacinth sound foolish, unpleasant, possibly racist, not terribly bright and provincially ignorant.

Hope this helps :)

(I predict more frothing melt downs peppered with multitudinous emojis in an attempt to appear indifferent. I may or may not reply to any midwitted attempts to flame me later, as time permits).

Oh do pipe down, dear. Your pompous condescending tone is intensely irritating.

Half of the posts on this thread sound like they have been edited by an AI. So weird.

Don’t worry. Soon she’ll figure out that you have to speak differently at home than you do with your peers. Then you’ll be blissfully unaware that out of the house she drops t’s like they hot, bruv.

@Kelly1969 , owt and nowt are dialect not slang.

@Yellowlife , it's ‘Mind your Ps and Qs’.
The meaning of M’s is clearer with the apostrophe, for example.
Apostrophes are for indicating possession or contraction. M's in that case is neither.
Look it up.

I know what apostrophes are used for! 😁
They are often used for plurals of individual letters (though this may vary depending on the publication in question).

They are not normally used for plurals of course, but this is an exception as an aid to the reader’s understanding.

@Yellowlife, the rule is that they are not.

Liverpudlian English is no less correct than RP English. It's just different.

There is no English Language Police Department.

No, that’s not a rule.