"No it ain't" - Does anyone else wince at the way their child speaks?

[merrygoround]

OK, I know I will sound like a terrible snob, but dd - age 3.5 - has recently started saying "ain't" instead of "it isn't"; she also has a habit of starting all her sentences with "isn't it" - not as in "isn't it a nice day", but as in "isn't it that I can't go the playground today", or "isn't it that daddy's at work?" - just about any sentence at all. I ignore it at the moment, but just wondered if anyone else would find it annoying. Neither dp nor myself use either expression. Or at least I never used to - recently I find myself starting sentences with isn't it too. Although neither expression is actually bad, I wonder what will come next, and how on earth I will deal with the inevitable swear words. While dd's very occasional use of "bugger" or "shit" (I admit, copied from me, I try to restrain myself now) doesn't worrry me I don't think I'm too keen to hear her using the f word quite yet.

init!!!!
my dd says that all the time
what on earth does it mean?!!!!!

sorry, you don't mind that your 3.5 year old says bugger or shit?
but you mind that she says ain't?

but she is 13 and they do have their own language!

LOL starlover!

Message withdrawn

my ds has started dropping his Ts - drives me MAD. i can hear him practising when i'm in another room... i am ignoring him as much as possible, though i've told him that he can speak how he likes to his friends but i need to be able to understand him. we will see.

The difference with the bugger and shit is that it is very occasional, like once every couple of months, and I know that I am guilty of having started that. The ain't thing is 25 times a day, and nothing to do with me!

I think it's sad that we (well some) want our kids to speak "queens english". I grew up with an accent - a Yorkshire one (so lots of dropped letter ) and already lots of regional accents are being lost. I think partly due to the fact that parents don't let their children speak with the local accent.

You try talking in a Yorkshire accent without 'losing' any letters )

i think we like our children to speak how we speak.

i live in the south east, have done all my life, and i do speak queens english... so i would like ds to do the same

Queens English!!! ha ha ha, I will be more than satisfied if DS just manages to speak English, without mixing it with Spanish or Catalan

Is not looking good though... last week he said he wanted to go ome ARGH!

I would like to speak queens English as well (not a joke) but it may well be in my next life.

i used to look after a little boy who spoke german and english

one day he decided he was only going to speak english and when his mum said something to him in german he replied

"i don't speak Deutsche"

lol

Don't worry, they grow out of it, once the novelty has worn off. Also once they start to decode the class pecking order in a more sophisticated way they realise that this isn't a prestige variant (as the linguists say).

Dd1 went through a v. cockney phase but is now (I think) reasonably RP (aged 10). She occasionally still misjudges her audience, as when she was overheard telling her (private school educated) cousins "My Nan says...". My mother is emphatically NOT a 'Nan' and was highly amused by the incident. But she is still prone to a fit of the vapours when encountering the variant, "Miss says..." or "I told Miss...", whereas I think it's quite funny. Similar rules apply to 'haitch' vs. 'aitch', or (eeek) toilet vs. loo, not to mention 'ain't', 'innit', and 'them books'.

Like most things, it passes, but if they realise it winds you up, it may take longer.

Good to see you and your brood, hc!

Funny until it happens to you. We know a pair of English emigrees whose children have refused to speak English or even recognise themselves as English. Very sad IMO, I would be devastated if DS refused to learn either of our languages, it will be like growing up a foreigner inside our home.

I have very mixed feelings, which is why I posted. My dp speaks "London" English and I was brought up with the more conventional Oxford kind. I have no issues with the way dp speaks, but despite his (in some eyes) less "proper" English (you can see how hard I am trying here not to offend )he doesn't say ain't.

I suppose Starlover has a point. Perhaps we just want them to speak like us. Somehow I feel it could be a losing battle. I am sure that if I let on to dd that I don't like her saying ain't, she will only say it even more. My reasoning at the moment is that if we keep talking in our normal way, at a certain point she will make a choice, which is her right, about how she wants to speak. I think that in order to fit in to the area we live in she may choose ain't and innit. After all, she will always be accepted by us, no matter what, but it is maybe more important to fit in with her peers.

We live in SElondon and I PMSL when the DCs first started to write. Their phonetic spelling of words was (and still is) so incredibly funny. Everything is written in SEL dialect.

So flower : flaahr, brother = brover etc etc

God knows where they get it from, DH and I are from way oop north

thanks for having us frogs! ds highly excited all the way home. xx

merrygoround, i think the way forward is to do what you would do when your child is first learning to speak
if they say a word incorrectly you just say it the right way

ie, she says "ain't that bird nice?"
you repeat but say "isn't that bird nice" and then go on to answer... she'll get it eventually, she is quite young

soapbox... i played i spy with some kids once and we spent ages on figuring out an "F" which ended up being "fumb" (thumb)

Thanks for posting, at least I know I'm not the only one. I think Frogs' post reflects the situation really well - very interesting angle.

Starlover, lol at fumb. I think we have a lot of that in store.

my dd (6) came home from playscheme singing,

Everyone once in a while
Suck a lemon if you can
If you can't suck a lemon
Suck an old bin man

Starlover, ds1 had a little German friend once who had real difficultly learning English. His teacher would spend the day pointing at objects and calling by their name in the hope that he would pick it up. At the end of one really bad day when he didn't seem to understand anything she said, he pointed to the door and said "doras!" which is the Irish word for door! (Children here learn Irish in school) VEry confusing for the poor little guy!

OMG blondehelen!

Blondehelen

oh bless chipmonkey! he must've wondered what was going on!

although apparently the earlier you start learning languages (more than one, obviously) the easier it is for you to learn others.