Estuary English in the West Midlands: I am confuse

[nanila]

Humuhumu has begun to drop her T's, replacing them with glottal stops. Wa'er. Beau'iful. Floa'ing.

I presume she's picked this up from nursery somehow, but I haven't worked out from whom. It sounds very peculiar when coupled with her otherwise Brummie pronunciation ("I loike oice cream").

It also sets my nerves jangling. "Floa-ting, darling," I say calmly through gritted teeth, "Not floa'ing." Inside my head there is a tiny rage-filled fiery-eyed Nanila screaming, "IT'S GOT A T! IT'S GOT A FLAMING T IN IT! PRONOUNCE THE T!"

I'm trying to unpack why this gets up my nose so badly. I have mental mechanisms in place for suppressing the confused welter of emotions, including sadness, that assail me when she speaks and she doesn't sound American. I know that once she realises I sound foreign, she'll never be able to un-hear it. I take delight in the Brummie accent, even though I'm fairly certain that in this rigidly stratified, classist, and small-c conservative society*, she will either have to learn to code-switch or train herself out of it to achieve material success. It doesn't bother me - much - when Londoners drop their T's. I have a terrible suspicion that I've managed to internalise a certain amount of class prejudice, given that when she says "free" instead of "three" or "bahf" instead of "bath", I have the same reaction, though reduced in intensity. I don't quite understand why it applies to my child and not to anyone else, though.

* Gross generalisation, #NotAllBrits, etc.

Comments

[recessional]

I would tend to suspect it's the same reason that children's tantrums/bad behaviour in public often make their parents MUCH MORE UPSET than they do, say, me-the-nanny, which is that nobody is judging ME by how they behave and my hindbrain knows it: when someone's thinking "some people's children!" it has nothing to do with me.

Which all works at a subconscious level, not a conscious one, because it still doesn't kick in even when I KNOW the people around us THINK I'm the mother (because I'm a white woman with brown hair looking after white children with brown hair so OBVIOUSLY even though we actually look nothing alike these are my children!). Whereas I know I'm going to struggle just as much as any mother I've worked for when it's my kids, because it's just SO GROUND IN.

So when it's Bob Londoner it might register as something they shouldn't do, but it also doesn't have anything to do with you; when it's Humuhumu, your brain flips out because it's YOUR BABY which means that in terms of "humans are judging me" it might as well be you except that instead of it being, you know, your own body and brain which you can sort of control, it's this small child that may run around and do things you don't want her to do! but which are still a reflection of you and everything about you as much as your own behaviour is.

(Which I suspect is part of why mothers and fathers who are just totally overwhelmed with their child's behaviour and can't figure out how to fix it get SO AGGRESSIVE/DEFENSIVE about anyone mentioning it.)

[perennialanna]

L (now 6) went through a stage of glottal stops at about 3 to 4, N (just turned 4) is in the thick of it now. It certainly isn't a feature of the Norfolk accents they hear at nursery. L seems to share my generic middle class southern English accent now, N still has some broad Norfolk vowels.

[liseuse]

Glottal stopping t's is also a very Yorkshire thing but it's not one my mother ever let me get away with. I do turn the middle d in Bradford into a t, which is also very Yorkshire and which drives my father up the wall - they were both from Manchester. The consequence of never having been allowed to glottal stop my t's, is that I flinch when I hear someone do it. "There's a t in that word, for the love of all you find holy," I scream internally. For my mother there was a definite class aspect - she'd spent her entire life being coached out of her accent because her mother had felt marked by her Irish accent, and whilst Northern vowels were fine, big hints of where you were from weren't. I don't have a strong Yorkshire accent. It's stronger when I'm tired or drunk or I've been spending time with people with either a cut-glass RP accent or a Northern accent. I'm very good at code-switching though. Mostly because we moved right down south when I was 9, and everyone mocked my accent endlessly before I learned to tone it down and just keep the vowels, and then I kept on doing it when I went to uni because it wasn't worth the hassle of people laughing.

[perennialanna]

I was told that Bratford-not-Bradford was fairly specific to Bradford itself (I was living on the Bradford/Leeds border, and some of the older parishioners claimed the accent changed half a mile down the road. Since my Cornish grandfather could identify which village within a ten mile circumference of Penzance strangers came from by the way they spoke, I think I'd believe it).

[ayebydan]

I think all children start by saying free, bahf because it takes a while to get used to a full set of teeth and moving your mouth in complicated ways. Posh kids and non-posh kids do it around here. I think the irritation is because people feel as a parent that it is their responsibility to get them to say it correctly and them not doing so comes with feelings of failure.

[nicki]

"If you say ain't, your mother will faint, your father will fall in a bucket of paint, your sister will cry, your brother will die, and that's what will happen if you say ain't."

(Accent snobbery ain't just a Brit phenomenon :P )

Correcting her pronunciation is a perfectly correct parental thing to do, really.

[thirdbird]

Purely anecdotal, but my friend's son had a broad Brooklyn accent at age 3 or so, probably picked up in daycare, but lost it a couple of years later. There's still hope. (and I'm fascinated by the tiny regions of Britain with wildly distinct accents! I guess we probably have the same level of variance in the US, but our regions are more spread out and it's less attached to class issues so it's...different, isn't it.)

[trascendenza]

I know that once she realises I sound foreign, she'll never be able to un-hear it.
Yeah, I hear that. Though I wonder if I'm a bit odd, because it took me well into my twenties to even be able to recognize the fact that my parents have accents, in the general sense (I could only notice it with certain words, but my ears somehow didn't process their general speech that way). I hope that your little ones have a good while longer before they notice.

Yes all Brits

[legionseagle]

It is Henry Higgins who observes that the moment one English person opens their mouth, it causes another English person to despise them, wasn't it? I've a moderately strong Northern accent myself, and due to a combination of being frightened by Thatcher's voice (there you are, that's the accent I despise: an imperfectly elocuted veneer of poshness over Lincolnshire) and no musical ear whatsoever I've never been able to code switch, and yes it's been a professional handicap, so I cam completely understand your worries. But I think perennialanna is right about the glottal stop business also being a phase of language development.

[sfred]

I only really became aware when I moved to London of the extent to which I drop T's and S's - because I never interacted with as many Oxbridge- and/or privately-educated people until I moved to London.

One of my sets of niecephews has essentially south-east English accents, despite their parents and grandparents all sounding lower-middle-class Yorkshire. We reckon the eldest decided early on that Charlie and Lola were a cooler example than his parents, and the youngest thought her brother was better than her parents.

Re: Yes all Brits

[sfred]

*nods* I definitely code-switch. At work (in London) a lot of the British people are quite posh and I hear myself getting posher. At home I sound like a Yorkshire person who's lived in London for a few years (because I am) and when I've been home-home or with a lot of Yorkshire people for a weekend I come back sounding much more Yorkshire.

[sfred]

:-) I lived in Bradford from age 8 to 18 but people could tell I wasn't from there (I was from between Keighley and Skipton) because I said Bradford with a D.

Re: Yes all Brits

[legionseagle]

If I could code-switch, I probably would, but I just can't. One of te reasons I moved back from working in the City to Manchester.

[legionseagle]

I moved from Rochdale to Lancaster at the age of three and my family were treated as really weird because (at least in part) of our South-East Lancashire accents.

Re: Yes all Brits

[sfred]

My parents were both southern, so I only got a Yorkshire accent when my big sister started school. I don't like code-switching - sounding posh gives me a sort of mild dysphoria - but it happens automatically.

[sfred]

Heh :-)

Re: Yes all Brits

[perennialanna]

I can't code-switch either, but my southern middle class accent puts me into the privileged group. The combination of that and a Classics degree does make people look sideways when I tell them I grew up in a tied cottage followed by a council house, on benefits, but that is at most a minor irritation.

I do think I get unfair advantages because of my accent, especially in my current dealings with benefits agencies (although some of it might be because Housing Benefits is all former colleagues, and I used to deal with HMRC professionally so I know their ways).

[rmc28]

N (nearly 4) is dropping Ts and Gs a lot at the moment, and it's not a sudden change of staff at nursery or anything. I find myself saying "say the T please darling" quite a lot at the moment, and then wondering when I started channelling my grandmothers.

I think C (now 9.5) went through a similar phase; right now he is picking up a lot of US speech patterns through watching lots of Minecraft playthroughs and Transformers toy reviews by USAian youtubers.

[rmc28]

I can just remember that when we moved from Southport to Wigan when I was 3-4ish, my accent was considered "posh". When we moved down to Wiltshire a few years later, it really really wasn't :-)

After a few decades in Wiltshire and Cambridge I've got a generic south-east UK accent with occasional northern vowels, but I do shift slightly depending on who I'm talking with.

[sfred]

I've been entertained when I've met people who've heard about Bradford/Bratford on the internet and so pronounce it Bratford rather than Bra'ford.

[sfred]

*likes*

My accent was "a bit posh" throughout school because my parents were southern so my vowels, while northern, were a bit less so than some other people. Now I'm in the south-east I'm very conscious of how very, very not-posh my accent sounds.

djm4 has a similar accent combination to mine for the opposite reason (raised in Cambridgeshire by Yorkshire parents) and we push each other's vowels north or south depending on what we're talking about as well as with whom.

[sfred]

...tiny regions of Britain with wildly distinct accents...
I spent my first eight years about ten miles from the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, which was absolutely honoured by the accents of the residents. Striking.

[antisoppist]

I am grinning over here because I grew up in the estuary of Estuary and whenever we got our code-switching wrong (or did it deliberately to wind up posh grandmother) and did our school glottal stops and f for th voices at home, my mother would switch to her childhood West Midlands in retaliation until we put our hands over our ears and said "stop it!"

When I first came back from university my sisters said I'd started talking posh and I know I switch back into more Essex every time I go back, and I feel I'm being a horrible patronising snob. It's not conscious. Now I live in the West Country, I've noticed I also go more Estuary when talking to people with rural Somerset accents and I don't know if it's because I'm a patronising snob, or because it's as close as I can get to chameleoning round here.

My two younger children are convinced that the past tense of "bring" is "brang". I don't know if that's a Somerset thing but the older one doesn't do it. We moved here when she was 7.

[purplecat]

I believe the "f" "th" thing is partly developmental. They are actually quite difficult and subtle sound to differentiate. When G was confusing them, we spent a certain amount of time working with her to hear the difference between "free" and "three" before we gave her any grief about pronounciation.

We do give her a hard time about the dropped Ts, though we do tell her it is because some people will, entirely incorrectly, judge her for dropping them and not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with it, but her accent is otherwise pretty posh (she doesn't seem to have picked up any Manchester at all) so the dropped T's are really the only noticeable thing. I don't know if we'd feel different degrees of intensity over different manifestations of local accent.

[cosmolinguist]

I've noticed this too: the subject of some conversations will make my accent change accordingly!

[cosmolinguist]

I went to college in Minnesota, mostly among other Minnesotans, but we still managed to have huge arguments over whether the game was "duck duck grey duck" or "duck duck goose" and the pronunciation of words like "milk." The U.S. does have these kinds of variations but I think being (at least as long as it's been a white-people English-speaking country) much younger, travel and voice communication (not just telephones but radio and TV) have been easier for most of its history, so there wasn't the chance for accents and dialects to get embedded as deeply as they did in Britain.

Re: Yes all Brits

[cosmolinguist]

I think I know what you mean about the dysphoria. My accent's very odd these days, but I don't like not sounding American and whether people think I do or not (opinions vary from "definitely" to "definitely not"!) can affect my mood more than I'd like it to.

I think I so effectively code-switched when I moved here, and have so little exposure to my native accent now, that it's hard for me to do it now. I don't sound (to myself) like I'm from anywhere particular now, and I don't like it. :/

[cosmolinguist]

My husband has by far the least scouse-working-class accent of his family, having decided to sound more like Radio 4 than them. :)

[liseuse]

I grew up in a small village near Skipton, so we had a Bradford postcode and everyone went to Bradford for anything that Skipton couldn't offer - which, tbh, was most things. But for some reason my entire year in school all put a t in the middle of Bradford. Perhaps we had a Bradford born schoolteacher? I genuinely have no idea why we did it, but we all did.

[liseuse]

I have no idea why my entire year in school - in a village about 10 miles from Skipton - suddenly had t's not d's in Bradford, but we all did. I can only think it was a Bradford born schoolteacher at an early age, but my memory is atrocious so I can't confirm that.

[liseuse]

Ahaha, yeah, I was trying to explain it via text to someone years ago, and they asked me if I meant 'brat as in bratwurst and then ford' and I had to explain that it's much more of an implied t, as are so many in Yorkshire.

[major_clanger]

I take delight in the Brummie accent, even though I'm fairly certain that in this rigidly stratified, classist, and small-c conservative society*, she will either have to learn to code-switch or train herself out of it to achieve material success.

I'm pleased to say that I know quite a few barristers for whom having a strong Brummie accent doesn't appear to have blunted their career (including my friend M who squeezed in getting a PhD in her spare time.) That said, the accent you adopt with your client (especially the sort of client you are escorted to meet in the cells) is not necessarily the same as the one you address the judge with.

Mind you, I met someone the other week who I'd not spoken to in person for five years, and apparently I'm starting to develop a hint of Brummie myself...

[sfred]

Hang on, which village? I'm from Sutton-in-Craven.

Re: Yes all Brits

[sfred]

*nods* Yes, this is what I mean.

[sfred]

Something that's just struck me about the combination of your comments here: I'd find it extremely difficult to pin down an accent to just one borough of London - or even just to north, south, east or west London - which has obviously changed since the time of Henry Higgins.

[liseuse]

Grassington!

[sfred]

*grins* We used to go to Grassington for exciting days out.

[liseuse]

And we used to go to Skipton!