To ask my husband to pronounce his th

[Pumpkinallspice]

My husband has always hade an "f" sound for his th's. Mumf for month, teef for teeth etc.

He is highly educated but it sounds terrible. His Dad who brought him up as a single parent uses the sound set so it's a learnt speech pattern.

We have twin 4 year olds who are now making the same speech sounds. Yes I'm a snob. I don't want them growing up with incorrect speech. Honestly I think how you speak affects how people perceive you.

I mentioned it to him and he was upset obviously. It goes without saying I don't want to upset him, but I really don't want the children growing up with the same speech style.

It's way too late for him to change, and you shouldn't ask him to. You just need to model your pronunciation to your child and gently correct then if they use the 'f'.

I cringe a bit when my DGD uses a glottal stop. It's a feature where we live though, so what can you do? Her mum pronounces her t's but her dad doesn't. It's not my place to interfere and correct, but I do model the 'correct' pronunciation when I respond to something she's told me. "You're going to a parTy? How lovely!"

Nothing worse than a voice implying that actually, somebody who isn't born into the middle classes with a standard home counties/private school generic accent might actually have as much, if not greater, innate intelligence than the listener, is there? Suggests that one isn't better than them after all.

<rolls eyes>

I have an accent. DH an DS(21yo) take the pee but would never ever try to change me. I think that it is sad that you feel this way about the man who you supposedly love.

The website says "the map shows no obvious dialectal patterning of this variable" so its not due to accent

In fact OP think of it like echoes of family we carry these small pieces of our past.

My Dad is from London his Dad was a barrow boy, every so often I'll suddenly sound very Peckham that's an echo of his roots. Then my grandparents are from Berkshire where Woodlice are called cheese logs, and anything with an r in is rrrrr.

No. What it means is that it is standard in a range of accents across the country.

"Woodlice are called cheese logs"

Bloody brilliant. I'm going to look this up!

I agree. I have a friend from Swindon who pronounces Th like F, and I used to have a friend from Newcastle who did too - he pronounced Ruth like Roof. Their accents are totally different in other ways, just the Th thing is the same.

Opposite ends of the country, practically- but both fairly normal for where they're from.

I pronounce ‘th’ as ‘f’ (raised in Kent) and same as a previous poster I had no idea until someone teased me at uni. I still can’t hear the difference very well, and despite trying I still can’t form the th sound (I probably need some speech therapy!) but my kids are both aware and able to pronounce it properly, my dh models it for them and corrects them if they pronounce it wrong. I would be very hurt if my dh told me I had to ‘pronounce it properly’ - it’s not that easy, and I already feel self conscious about it

Thats exactly what i'm saying - the variant is not due to accent, but standard across a range of accents

That's a load of rubbish. Even as adults people can learn completely different languages with different complex sounds and tones like mandarin.

My friend's DH has the same speech "impediment".

He called his daughter Ruth, who gets called Roof all the time. His son also speaks like his dad and can't pronounce th either.

yes.
My dd does it - I’ve no idea why, it’s not common in the region and neither DH or I do it. She went to good schools, we tried some speech therapy. Well, she’s got a degree from Cambridge and a good job now, as far as I can see the only time it’s ever been a problem was when I was temporarily baffled by her wanting to see a film called ‘four’.

Some can, some can’t.

I've lived in Wiltshire for 50 years and Swindon for 30 of them, I've never heard th-fronting here @MumoftwoNC. I've only ever heard it on tv or radio- there's a current presenter on radio one that slips between f and th and quite often self corrects.

It may be the circles you move in. I lived in Bristol for a while and it wasn't uncommon there.

It's kinda satisfying that not being able to pronounce th affects some MNers more than me. Maybe im infuriating someone who's too chicken to express their views. And actually, I wouldn't correct it even if I could because it shows you don't need to speak perfectly to do reasonably well in life.

This made me remember the time when my friend's DH told me his SIM card was free. I really thought that was what he meant and asked him where I could get a free SIM card.

Then my friend said that his service provider was Three

Hear hear. It drives me mad when people talk about speaking “properly” as plenty have done on this thread. It’s a value judgement that places a certain type of English accent as higher values than other accents. Someone even said that they had “no pronounced accent” or something like that. I’d bet they have a “very pronounced” English RP accent!

It's not his accent, it's bad English. How come you have known him this long and not asked him to pronounce it properly? I'm English and my partner is not from here, so he always corrects me on my lazy pronunciation. Tell him you don't want your kids to not pronounce things properly and he needs to stop.

It's not an accent. Pronouncing th a f is not an accent, it's not speaking properly. I say this as a person from the North with a thick accent. Same way as saying 'hospical' is not accent, and not pronouncing your t is not an accent (I don't pronounce my t's either.)

Yes - it’s a sort of ignorance or narrow mindedness.

I'm from Australia, still speak with accent. My kids don't have a touch of it, just deep Surrey accent.

But my husband does also occasionally drop his t's, I occasionally correct him 😃

Yep I actually didn't know their proper name until late teens!

I told my DH that I noticed he did this and that it drove me crazy because of where I had been teaching children phonics. He retrained himself to use the sound. Took him saying the world's slowly to remind his brain. Uses it always now and notices when others don't