Dropping his "Ts" .. help

[Twiglett]

4.5 year old DS has suddently started dropping his Ts (he had a phase of doing this about a year ago) it drives me bananananananas

bu'er (butter)

Can you ge' i' (get it)

what do I do? how do I stop him? I can't bear guttoral(sp) stops .. neither DH nor I speak like this

ignore him unless he says it correctly?

Twiglett, join the club.

We just say "what?" "huh?" etc until he says it right.

We do live in East London, so glottal stops are appropriate to his area, but not to our house!

I'm really dreading my parents realising their grandson asks for a bo'le of wa'er. (bottle of water)

Twiglett - My Ds (4) has starting doing this too!! I have discovered to my horror that I do it sometimes!

I keep hearing my Grans voice echoing in my head "Butter has 2 T's in it, Missus!"!!!!!

glottal stops ... arrgghhh ... of course that was the term my mush-brian was straining for

I'm only familiar with the term coz I'm b*tching about it all the time.

I'm quite sure neither DH nor I uses glottal stops - Can you imagine a glottal stop with a Canadian accent? Gah. And DH has an RP accent.

That being said, I'm pretty sure that some of the classroom assistants at DS1's school do this.

I tried pretending to not understand him yesterday but DH said I was making it worse and I should just correct him ..

I think we started by correcting, but I'm not comfortable with correcting as a general policy.

DS1 didn't take long to work out what we were objecting to. He repeats himself and puts in the Ts, most of the time. And he sometimes says the Ts right away.

The thing is, it's fine for them to drop their Ts when they're in an environment where that's ok. DS1 probably should drop his Ts when he's in the local playground, so he fits in. He just needs to remember them when he's talking to us.

A good friend, who has four kids, and is very very mellow, has this as her policy. And I think she say "what?" a lot. Her oldest two don't drop Ts in the house, I don't think.

How hilarious Twiglett, my ds is doing EXACTLY the same thing! I blamed his nursery, but maybe it's just in the South London air, like a virus
He does it quite deliberately so bottle is 'bo-awl'. I wonder if he is just doing it to experiment with sounds and likes the fact that it makes me cringe.
I suspect I should just ignore it but like you find it acts on me like nails down a blackboard.

I say we don't have a compu'er (or whatever) so he can't play. He thinks it's a game now.

Recently he had a friend to vist who said 'in it' (another pet hate of mine) in conversation. My ds looked at me and smiled as he knows I hate it. I hope I'm not being a snob. My ds understands that he can speak how he likes in the playground but at home he has to adhere to our ways of speaking.

"nails down a blackboard" ... 'xactly

pmsl dss talks like this too and I just refuse to understand what he is saying. He also uses loads of Americanisms like 'garbage' and 'movie' and 'mall' which really grate too and to top it all hes started doing that Aussie thing (cant think what its called) by turning every sentance into a question.

I know Im fighting a loosing battle as hes now 13 but at least he aware of how the words are pronounced which can only be a good thing.

tarantula, it's called up-talking, I think. I hate it. I thought only girls did that? It's very American.

Lol @ nails down a blackboard but you have my sympathy, too. When mine have lost their T's I usually very calmly say I didn't understand that word, could they repeat it, please. They soon get the picture.

Mind you, ds1 has been living in LA for three yrs now and although he hasn't acquired a Ca accent he has taken on board some idiosyncracies, so we are no longer 'British', but 'Briddish' in his RP accent. He also pronounces American words such as 'faucet' in RP. It sounds v odd, rather weird and hybrid. Haven't had the heart to point it out yet, esp as he's now living in Israel, anyway!