Do you pronounce the word....

[ILookAtTheFloor]

"Value"

as.....

Vow-yoo.

I'm daughter says it like this and it makes my heckles rise. I've noticed the Tesco advert voice over woman also pronounces it this way! I can't explain why I dislike it so much.

Does he say 'an ew' or 'a ew'?

@mathanxiety an ew!

Umm…. Letters.
I’ve never been able to pronounce anything without them 😂

@masterbeth I don't think it is lazy or not lazy - I also think it takes more effort to consciously decide to do a glottal stop, not less, if you have been brought up sounding the t etc. If you have been brought up not sounding the t etc it takes less.

I think people like Russell Brand have helped make the glottal stop trendy, possible. Or, for students it might be saying "I was brought up in a non RP environment but still managed to do well"!!

I went to university in the north and I remember that some of the Yorkshire students had two accents - eg, my boyfriend from Doncaster spoke broad Doncaster in Doncaster or with other people from Yorkshire but most of the time spoke RP with the tiniest hint of Yorkshire.

I sometimes pronounce Ls as Ws in words like this (an East Midlands accent thing I think). Itawyan rather than Italian for example. I do say val-yoo but, thinking about it, I make a conscious effort to pronounce the L rather than it coming naturally.

Thank you for saying that people have two accents. I know someone who could speak what I would call broad Geordie if you asked him to, but usually he speaks RP with a slight Newcastle accent. Usually I speak what one woman regards as unaccented RP but I know for certain that there is an accent going on there. On the other hand I can speak with a broader accent, almost like the one which a Yorkshire-man once took the mickey out of.

Only excuse would be speech impediment.

Please don’t make it a variant that starts to spread so fast it becomes commonplace. The one that gets me is the scores of TV presenters saying pronouncing words that start with “st” as “sht…” so for instance “shtation” and “shtanding”. First noticed it with Dom what’s his name on daytime TV

Stacey Dooley would pronounce it as the second example.

I got into discussion last week with a friend who said I say the word tomorrow in a weird way. This friend is from Merseyside. I say tomorrow exactly as it's written, they say tomorror.

It’s just an accent thing, surely?

I’d associate it with Essex or maybe an old school cockney accent.

I refuse to get het up about variations in accent and dialect.

And do you always pronounce those letters in the same way?

Enough, bough, cough etc.

Glottal stop.

If you're talking about what happens to the l in value in some accents, it's not actually a glottal stop, which would produce something like vah'-yoo. Vow-yoo is a different linguistic phenomenon called l-vocalisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-vocalization

(I use both. Along with th-fronting, which MN also hates!
Funnily enough, I'm also a working-class historian! But I've never been on TV.)

No, I don't pronounce the 'r' in farmer and I don't enunciate the difference between 'witch' and 'which', because those are not parts of the accent (or dialect, I'm not sure) of where I live.

If you read what I wrote on 15.11.23 at 17.53, you will see that I qualified what I wrote.

Hmm, so you're saying it's okay in your opinion, @upinaballoon, as long as it's someone's actual accent/dialect, but not if it's an affectation. Is that right?

I really don't think laziness is the motivator for people who affect an accent in any case - so I'm still not sure what you mean by 'lazy speech'.

It's been fascinating watching and listening to the covid inquiry and the way the various barristers are pronouncing words with the prefix 'trans' (eg transmission, transport, transcript, translation).

Some barristers, for some words, say trans - rhymes with bans

Others say trans - rhymes with barns

Others say trans - rhymes with bens

And for a couple of them, it's just a jumble, sometimes being course-altered mid-word.

I was wrong.

It makes me think of DelBoy going to be a miwl-wonaire.