Shocked about what ds's friend aged 6 can't do ...

[Easy]

Today We took ds's friend (well his girlfriend, according to him) for an outing, our first time with this friend. Now I know my ds is advanced for 6 (everyone tells me so), but I was shocked to find that she
a) is unable to fasten a car seatbelt herself (her mum put her in my car as we went, she couldn't fasten it herself for the return journey)
b) Doesn't know when her birthday is, beyond being able to say "It's a long time to my birthday"
c ) can't identify the months of the year, and doesn't know it is February now.

Also can't understand why I corrected the phrase " I don't want no chips", altho' I recognise this may be acceptable language at her house.

My son has fastened his own seatbelt since just after his 5th birthday, has a complete grasp of the calendar, and has been able to tell people his birthday date since 3 y.o.

He can now tell the time (altho' won't admit it, he's too sly).

Are my expectations too high and the girlfriend is average for 6, or is his friend "a bit behind"

I'm genuinely curious about this one

my little friend (he prefers me to DS atm lol) Daniel is 3 and a wee bit and he knows what month it is and when his birthday is, I thought that was perfectly normal! I know for years I used to get mixed up around August and September (put them the wrong way!) but that's weird (sorry!)

are you really six before you can tell the time? Blimey.

I agree with the double negative, my kids will be given a 3 hour lesson in grammatical correctness if they ever use those when they're not joking!

As for the seat-belt I really don't get that, I guess it's because she's always had it done, my DS (2) can do his own car seat clasp up (and it's more compicated than a seatbelt!) but probably because I like to make.. er... let him do things for himself

Double negatives have very specific places and uses IMO - great in songs and when doing comical accents... not so great in every day use of English.

(Not saying the girls not intelligent btw, as I'm sure she is, as people have said just probably not been exposed to certain things yet)

ack this is one of those threads where I trip over the foot in my mouth every 5 minutes

But in some dialects, double negatives are perfectly acceptable. And presumably this little girl lives in a household where double negatives are part of the dialect.

The big reason why people get so hot under the collar about this particular grammatical flaw is because it is a class indicator. Posh English doesn't include this particular deviation from Standard English.

I don't want my kids to be posh... but my mum had eloctution as a child (god knows why!) and so I speak like her, with a sort of 'rounded' accent iyswim... and anything incorrect just grates really badly, like nails on a chalkboard!

Maybe I'm a snob in disguise

I do slip into a good thick North Yorkshire accent now and then when I'm suuurpriiised liiike

elocution* always start typing 'electrocution', which is a secret wish of mine....

What utter claptrap NQC. I grew up in an area with a very strong regional dialect, in which double negatives certainly featured often and were "normalised" in colloquial speech in the way you describe. Nonetheless, everyone knew - and knows - that double negatives are incorrect. Even those who use them know that they are wrong. Using poor English certainly is common - it's still poor English!

"Poor" english is still correct for the dialect it's in. Yes, double negatives are incorrect Standard English, but they're fine in many dialects.

Look, there's a big difference between someone saying "I don't want no chips", and "Me no eat chip". The first is correct dialect, the second is not actually english (in any dialect I know of).

No, there is very little difference. One is marginally more inarticulate than the other - both are horrible clumsy lousy English. Just because an error features commonly in a dialect does not make it "fine" or "correct in that dialect" - it just makes it a very common mistake in that region.

My toddler says 'me no eat no chip'

I'M COMMON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can put up with and accept as dialect anything, anything at all, except for "less" mistakenly used for "fewer"

Gets my dander right up.

Regarding seatbelts, I can't always do seatbelts in strange cars, give the girl a break

Yes, less/fewer bugs me, but not so much as the "they gave it to he and I" error.

Greensleeves, I'm coming at this from a linguistics point of view, I suspect you may be coming at it from the point of view of a teacher or similar? I certainly don't accept double negatives in my childrens' speech, it's not correct english to me.

But that doesn't change the fact that other english dialects exist, with their own grammatical and pronounciation rules. If you don't accept "I don't want no chips" as valid in a dialect, but merely a comon error, then presumably dialects don't exist, just Standard English, and a bunch of people who don't speak properly?

Of course dialects exist. And they feature a fascinating array of grammatical errors.

There are different schools of opinion in linguistics, as in any other academic field. And no, I'm not a teacher. It seldom pays to make assumptions about people, I find. Having said that - are you American?

seldom
now that's a word you don't hear very often.

Geddit, geddit?

Close, I'm Canadian.

I hadn't realised there were linguists who felt that dialects were just collections of "errors". I thought they all went for the argument that a language is just a dialect with an army. (See: Swedish/Norwegian, or the whole Yugoslavian thing, vs all the "dialects" in Italy which aren't mutually comprehensible.)

[wince]

Ah, nobody said that dialects were "just collections of errors" - you shouldn't put words into people's mouths!However there is, and has always been debate amongst linguists (and other specialists, eg historians specialising in Middle English and the evolution of our modern language) about where the boundaries of acceptable English are to be drawn in the face of variations such as regional dialects/common usage/changes in language due to advancing technical terminology. There is a disputed balance between the need to allow the language to be living, organic and adaptable, and the need for basic rules to be maintained in order that the system as a whole remains workable. To say that any grammatical error - particularly ones that stray into self-contractictory meaning - which features commonly in a dialect must be integrated as an acceptable variation is a blunt instrument, and not at all a universal view.

Oh, I'm not suggesting that this should be included in Standard English. But if these sorts of grammatical irregularities aren't considered valid in a dialect, what else does a dialect consist of?

(I find linguistic concern about the language becoming unworkable etc hilarious, frankly. Languages keep themselves "workable" without any help from academics or pedants. The whole PNG story with pidgin becoming a full language once it had native speakers says it all, for me.)

At any rate, I suspect we can agree that this girl obviously learned "I don't want no chips" from her parents or peer group. Her use of it doesn't indicate that she's "behind", it just indicates what language she's used to at home.

I think it comes down to a semantic disagreement about the word "valid". Of course I accept that the double negative is in common usage within several dialects, and that the girl who said "I don't want no chips" was using one of these dialects. However I still maintain that that sentence contains a grammatical mistake, dialect or not. And while it's unlikely that the girl herself would have known she was making a mistake, I imagine her parents, if asked, would know that the double negative was poor use of English - and they wouldn't care, because their dialect was normal within their peer group.

It is perfectly possible to speak a broad dialect without including the grammatical errors, by the way. My family make a point of it. They are very proud of their dialect, love all the idioms and accented pronunciations and distinctive expressions. However they are all very keen on grammar too, so they don't use double negatives or other glaring mistakes.

Presumably, if Essex, or Black America, or a bunch of people still speaking Middle Ages English, got an army, their English would become its own language (let's call it GreensleevesEnglish, for the sake of simplicity ), then this would become grammatical, right? In GreensleevesEnglish?

What? I've read your last post several times in the hope of wringing some meaning from it, but no joy.

I don't share your obsession with armies. Nor am I on a mission to stamp out regional dialects. I simply maintain that English has rules, and when dialectical variations break those basic rules, the result is a commonly used, regionally normalised grammatical error.

Oh, I'm just suggesting that if the UK split up into two countries, the two would probably end up with different languages (as happened with Sweden/Norway, and with the former Yugoslavia). And in one of those countries, maybe the double negative would be grammatically acceptable. (As it is in French, and used to be in English.)

Oh dear me, you'll get your posts deleted if you carry on like this girls!

No, I doubt the double negative would become acceptable in either variation of English. It would represent a complete departure from the basic rules which have become established over centuries. Regional dialects which feature (optional) grammatical errors don't threaten that, in my view. And I think the French example is slightly different - the negative has two different components "ne" and "pas" which function together to form a single negative. French syntax is completely different too - it's very different from English in a lot of respects (although related in others). If a French sentence were to feature "ne" twice instead of "ne" and "pas", that would be a fairer analogy and it sounds commensurately wonky.