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.

@HoLeeFuk 😆🤣

Aw, hit a nerve have I? Bless you

Right.

So if an Australian or Scot pronounces a word differently to you, are they automatically wrong?

She's a parochial, small minded, ill educated nitwit. I actually don't think she is capable of understanding why she is so completely, totally and utterly wrong.

Definitely mention to the teacher. My 5 year old did this exact thing a few months ago and I couldn’t stand it I was quite strict with her and corrected it every time and praised her when she began speaking properly again, she goes to a private school so it hadn’t come from there it was bizarre !

This is your retort? Good grief, woman. Ask mumsnet to delete this thread. You have utterly humiliated yourself and are digging a deeper hole with every pig-ignorant comment.

Actually the teacher and staff should be modelling correct pronunciation regardless of any accent.

We have a few local pronunciation of words and staff know to use the correct sounds in class even if they slip back in the staffroom.

I would mention it and ask how school ensures words are correctly pronounced.

So as an Irish person, would I be required to pronounce words in an English accent or would my 'wrong' pronunciation be allowed?

@Thursdayschild2025 , There's no such thing as speaking properly.
There is. Enunciating clearly means better communication.
If the teacher isn't enunciating clearly, that affects your child's education.
Look at the spelling and grammar errors on sites like this one. Errors like except/accept, affect/effect have/of, council/counsel ...

Accent and dialect don't mean 'not speaking properly', not enunciating clearly does.

You sound very very worked up @Thursdayschild2025 . Seems as if you can’t handle another persons opinions.

I suggest you give mumsnet a break for a bit before you get too upset 😘

So you’re saying a Scot or an Aussie can’t speak in their own accent? 🙄

I’m torn with this - I changed my son’s nursery because of accent/grammar issues. He came home saying ‘int instead of isn’t and in the , dodie (which I learnt meant dummy), mi instead of my, ya instead of you, owt and nowt and lots of other regional accent phrases. It wouldn’t bother me so much if it was from the children but all the staff spoke like that too and it was getting to a point where we were going backwards with his speech and sentence construction. If it wasn’t so significant and was just a typical regional accent thing like dropping T’s, it wouldn’t bother me.

FWIW my mum used to correct me as a child as at school I was told I spoke like a posh b*tch. I learn t to adapt and still speak differently depending on who I’m around. It’s a useful tool! It’s also scary how differently I’m treated depending on how I’m speaking 🥴

@Thursdayschild2025 All ok with you? I don’t think the OP has painted herself in any of the ways that you describe. Your interpretation is a bit alarming

she's not going to be held back in life if she doesn't speak RP

I'd like to see some serious research on this point. (Not suggesting you should go and find a link, but it is an interesting issue).
I guess whether she is held back depends on what career and marriage she aims for.

Exactly We had a French teacher who was a French native speaker - she also taught geography, no one made her pronounce her 'h's at the beginning of words when she was teaching Geography in English... I guess because that would have been deeply insensitive at best and linguistic bullying at worst?

So if I say 'car' with a rhotic 'r' rather than 'cah' am I not enunciating properly? It's a genuine question because I'm not sure what you mean.

No, that’s their regional accent.

Dropping t’s is not part of mine or my husbands regional accent or the local area so that’s why we are correcting her.

My son is younger but he models what he hears. I don’t have a strong regional accent at all but I do speak with short, northern “a” sounds for bath, path, grass etc. We live in the south and he will naturally have southern “a” sounds but if I say “it’s bath time” and he says “yes, bath time” back, he will have a short “a”. It isn’t conscious and I doubt it is for your daughter. It’s called linguistic accommodation and we all do it to a degree, in different ways. She will either “grow” out of it or if it’s how her friends speak then she may not. Doubtful there’s much you can do about it and it may well mean she’ll be good at adapting to the tone of those around her when she’s older. Not a bad thing.

If you cay 'car' with a rhotic R or not, that is regional accent. If you say 'motor' (non rhotic and a glottal stop), that's unclear enunciation.

Bath - 2 possible ways of saying it. Baff isn't one of them.

Good news/bad news, OP:

A close relative also in the Midlands with a decidedly posh accent had the same dilemma with their two DC. They ignored it. One DC reverted to RP spontaneously at Oxbridge and the other when they themselves became a teacher.

In my home country, I spent early childhood in a region with some of its own grammatical constructs. There is no doubt they were technically wrong but even our teachers used them all the time. DM was from a different region, hated this, and tried to forbid us using them.

It just made me awkward and self conscious and reluctant to bring friends home when I could play more happily elsewhere. Is that what you want for DD?

I don't speak RP and I've done fine. That's not to say there isn't snobbery about.

Interestingly, the only situation in which I've seen someone's accent really work against them is when a woman I was interviewing from yorkshire who attended Cambridge. She spoke in very pronounced RP. I didn't really notice it but two of the other interviewers (both English) felt it came across very false and weird and that made her seem less trustworthy. I think it was a factor in her not getting the job, which I didn't agree with, incidentally. My guess was that she altered her accent when she went to university. It did seem a bit forced, but I understood why she did it, given the sort of raging snobs that are on this thread.

This is a year 1 child learning sounds to help reading. They need to know the correct sounds and this is what the teacher should model regardless.

I say 'moe - sher' for motor. Is that unclear enunciation?

My DS5 has been through stages of doing this, definitely picked up from school- also rural-ish midlands. I went through a stage of correcting him but it made him do it even more so I just ensure I pronounce the words as I normally would. I havent heard him do it for a while and I'm sure they will change things over time.

I wouldn't expect the teacher to have an input in this, they might not be able to tell if a child have family from elsewhere that have a different accent which they'd probably be told off for correcting. Teachers have enough to put up with.

Projection. Your repeated infantile attempts at a burn reveal your utter rage at having been ridiculed repeatedly.

You are behaving exactly as a provincial, small minded fool behaves when their ignorance is revealed. It's to be expected. I am genuinely embarrassed for you.