Accents and children

[leigh2209]

I hesitate to post this message as I know it's a subject that elicits strong opinions but I would really welcome your views and any advice people might have.

My wife and I are currently raising our 2 year old daughter here and I'm really worried that our daughter will pick up a Leeds accent. I quite like accents but to be completely honest, I really dislike the Yorkshire accent!

I was born in the North but have moved around all my life and am told I speak without an accent. My wife is not from the UK and English isn't her first language. She speaks English beautifully though and has a subtle and charming accent. I'd really like my daughter to 'speak nicely' too but don't see how this is realistically possible if we stay here! I'm afraid we can't afford to send her to a private school. What can we do apart from move before she gets much older? Elocution lessons? Any ideas?

My main goals as a parent are that my daughter grows up a kind, considerate person and that she's happy. How she speaks is of no real importance but I would like to raise my daughter to speak lovely clear English without a strong accent.

Nobody has 'no accent'. What people are referring to as 'accentless' English is presumably RP: an accent, but the traditionally prestige one, hence it having established itself as a norm/standard to be aspired to.

The British are odd about accents. Elsewhere the class associations with particular accents/dialects, while not completely absent, are much weaker.

It annoys me when people fail to dsitinguish between dialect and ungrammatical usages and mistake the former for the latter.

(RP speaker here)

*Distinguish. RP speaker who can't spell, or at least type.

OP, it does occur that, in being so keen for your child not to speak/sound like the people around you, yon don't want her to be mistaken for 'one of them' and you therefore are, quite actively, denigrating them, and considering one of their key characteristics undesirable. How does that sit with living in your locality/community?

I would clamp down on incorrect grammar and make sure the child is spoken to and read to (sentence structure). Other than that I would leave it be. Not important.

My husband has a very neutral northern accent - nothing like the very distinctive accent of the town where he grew up, and which his mother has. He did go to a private school, but his accent sounds most like his dad’s who was definitely a grammar-corrector, so stamped out gramatically incorrect localisms.

I’m Australian - my mum was American. I have a very neutral Australian accent because my mum repeatedly told me that a strong, nasally Aussie accent with the antipodean rising inflection was ignorant. I went to a state school and was frequently asked, ‘Elphaba, how come you talk so posh?’

Both of my DSs (living in DH’s hometown of the thumping, strong very distinctive northern accent) sound more like me than either DH or their peers. They have vaguely Australian vowels with the odd northern pronunciation of ‘bath’, ‘path’ etc. DH and I are very much of the school of stamping out horrible, heavily-accented pronunciation and not letting bad grammar be passed off as ‘dialect’. I do not, and will not ever, accept that ‘youse’ is ‘dialect’, for example. It’s just fecking ignorant wrong.

In my experience, parents have far more influence than peers on a child’s accent.

Weeping... You're kidding, right?
First, I think the word you are looking for is 'dialect', as your daughter will be growing up speaking English as a bilingual child.
How is your daughter's dialect of any consequence, really?
I grew up in a rural part of my native country, where a strong regional dialect was spoken. My mother, like your DW, was an immigrant with a subtle accent, and my father spoke the national equivalent of a cockney dialect. I grew up with a rich linguistic heritage and learnt to adapt my speech to different situations from an early age. At home, I spoke the one way (no dialect), at school another (beautiful broad regional dialect). This is now repeated with my own children, in my adopted UK, where I am the one speaking English with a barely perceptible accent, my DP has a charming SE dialect and my DC speak without any noticeable dialect at home and trowel on the broad local dialect when at school or with their friends. Amazing!
I am a primary teacher, and see this so often; children who speak so differently depending on situation and occasion. Let's hope your DD gets to enjoy similar linguistic creativity!

Elphaba: 'Youse' (and yis/y'all etc.) is a creative way of signifying a plural 'you', which is otherwise impossible in modern standard English. How is that 'ignorant'? Ignorant of what? Certainly not ignorant of how many people you're addressing, which one could accuse the modern nondistinguished 'you' of. I think that's your mother talking there.

I live in the south.

When my DD started school they taught them to sound out words and that meant she said things like, bath and grass in a northern accent.

I just kept correcting her to the dialect/pronunciation that I prefer.

Just what is wrong with having an accent?

Just let her be. My nan was very posh and was forever correcting me. It drove me insane and I was always cautious about how I said things. In 10+ years, her accent will be the least of your worries

I am Yorkshire born and bred - Mum from north east, Dad from Barnsley (no Barnsley accent).
I always got teased at school for not having a Yorkshire accent.

My kids - Son - got teased at school for not sounding Yorkshire - to me he had more of an accent than me (or his dad)
Daughter - didn't get teased at school - sounded less Yorkshire to me, except when on the phone (before mobiles) to her friends, when she spoke with a broader accent than my son.

He didn't adapt, she did - to the extent I knew which of her friends she was talking to.

Neither of them now have a pronounced accent as they work with people from all over the country.

Local people say either we don't have accents or we sound posh.

From the south - people know we are from the North but can't even vaguely pinpoint our location.

It is likely that, as children, yours will want to fit in. So long as that isn't all they hear, they will adapt as they get older.

My dh parents were northern. Dh born and brought up in southern England. As a child he was looked after by his northern grandparents who moved down here too.both sets of grandparents had much stronger northern accents than his parents. He has a 'normal' southern accent but does say the northern pronunciation of bath, grass, graph i.e not putting r's in.

Warmth and depth, are you seriously equating a Leeds accent with a dialect?
We have a rich variety of accents in the UK, but dialects are much thinner on the ground.
As a primary teacher I think it would be a good idea to study the difference between accents and dialects so that you are not ascribing the benefits of bilingualism to the entire nation.

OP, you come across as a bit of a snob. It’s really easy to assume that people with a regional accent are less intelligent/ educated. This is not the case. I recommend challenging your class based prejudices a bit.

Move to Harrogate, perhaps?

Look on the bright side - you could have fetched up in Doncaster.

(Lancastrian by birth here. Via several other places to somewhere way further south. And with beautifully spoken, state-school educated DC).

If you made your daughter have elocution lessons imagine what everyone in her class would say! When she is an adult if she isn't happy in her accent she can change it. I'm from north east and people know I'm northern but can only tell Geordie if I "put it on a bit more" as I've lived in the south for 11 years.

I actually think having an accent gives you character and I think you sound like quite a snob. I'm happy to have a northern accent

It's possible she won't pick up an accent. I'm still waiting for my kids to start talking like Weegies.
Instead, they have my Essex accent.
I once caught the little boy chasing after some older girls at soft play and going: "Gaiwls! Gaiwls! Gaiwls!" like a cross between Billy Bragg and Benny Hill.

Well, it could be worse. You could be in Scotland. In the North East. Ken fit a mean quine?
From the NE Scotland, so I'm allowed to poke fun

Move from Leeds ? Move to Fulham or Kensington

DH and I both have southern private school accents. 3 yo DD has a mix of that and Black Country. Really funny, and it's so obvious where a phrase has come from because of the accent she says it in. Actually has definitely come from home (probably me) while cuppa tae is clearly from role play at school.

I'm not really bothered because she's showing signs of a good ear so will tend to unconsciously follow those around her the most like DH and I do.

Realistically if she accepts that scones have clotted cream then jam her accent will be irrelevant!

Birmingham's nice.

Why does it bother you if she has an accent? How you feel she will be perceived versus having "proper" queens english?? Lack of career opportunities?
I'm genuinely interested.

Thank fuck you don't live in Barnsley.

tosser

Realistically if she accepts that scones have clotted cream then jam her accent will be irrelevant!
But how does she say scones? Hopefully to rhyme with own not on as she has a cuppa tae 😂😂
I

Anyone who says scones have clotted cream then jam is a whidden!

DH and I are both Irish living in the US and we have not lost our accents. Our children all have american (and very occasionally Boston) accents. Peers influence accent way more than any other influence. I have yet to meet the child of immigrant parents here who has the accent of their parents.

Basically if you live in a place, you have to accept that your child will probably have the accent of that place. I understand how dissonant that can be - nothing to do with snobbery - just how odd it is to hear you children speak in a way you don't (I found it most obvious on the phone with them when they were young - now I am used to it). We did correct grammar/pronounciation though the same way we would if we lived at home.

On the other hand my children eat with a knife and fork like Europeans - not americans so we did influence that.