Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Weaver]

Some people have parents who come from different areas and thus speak different dialects or even different languages. I am one such mongrel myself, my mother came from near Matlock in North East Derbyshire and my father came from near Alton Towers in East Staffordshire. So mum spoke East Derbyshire (dales) dialect and father spoke a southern variety of Staffordshire Moorlands dialect but a very posh variant relatively speaking as he had a posh grammar school education which I think was not free from the odd remark that I remember.

Anyway, to finally come to the point, get round to my questions:

• When you think about children’s speech, how much does it differ from and how does it relate to that of their parents ?
• How much does it differ?
• Is mother the biggest influence?
• Are there other influences that make the children’s speech different from that of either parent?
• And if the children are unlike their parents why is that ?

[sevenlayermuddle]

Speaking for myself, I have to include Grandparents, as my Gran (Dad’s mum) lived with us.

Dad had aspirations for me and my sister to do well, and so he’d often criticise Gran, and us too,  for bad language habits.  We listened to these criticisms and strived to please.    Bad habits are different from accents, imho.   Compare true Cockney with East Enders “Yobism” for example, imo one is an accent, the other is just lazy speech.

Dad sent us both to private school.   In my case, I’d attribute the school as strongest influence on my accent and speech.   Quite a few folks from my school can be heard daily on National TV and radio, so I think they were strong on spoken language.     Living down south, southern people think I sound Scottish.   But back home, nobody in Glasgow recognises my accent at all.  I have become nobody’s child in that respect.

[kitz]

Are there other influences that make the children’s speech different from that of either parent?

I would think childhood peers also have a big influence. 

I was brought up in Australia from a young age and developed an Aussie accent despite neither of my parents having any trace.  I can remember after we came back to the UK being teased many times at school because of my accent, so made a determined & conscious effort to drop it.   I definitely don't have a broad Lancashire accent, although there is probably a definite Northern lilt now that Southerners would be able to detect, but many Northerners think my accent is 'posh'.   Surprisingly though whenever in the US many times people have assumed I was Australian, so that childhood lilt is still slightly there.   

These days I tend to hear far less RP amongst the younger generations.   TV and other broadcasting mediums no longer appear to require it as long as the speech is clear... and you're just as likely to hear a TV announcer to have for example a Geordie accent. Perhaps BBC news is one exception, but even they have some presenters with regionalised accents.
URP isn't something I hear often at all.   Is it dying out except amongst royalty and the upper class?  Even the BEEB dropped it years ago.
The Internet means we are also hearing a lot more American accents and kids today seem to easily adopt some of the American idioms and as a whole we seem to be heading towards a more 'multinational' accent.   Even I don't notice accents as much as I used to unless it's particularly broad.   

[Weaver]

I have a huge problem with RP supposed standard referred to in linguistics and phonetics textbooks. Is there even such a thing. I am not convinced that the queen sounds the same as BBC TV announcers, and I’m not convinced this was ever true. The sort of royal speech that is very plummy and pretty awful and cringeworthy where the word house rhymes with lice, did bbc news readers really speak exactly like that, or did they leave out the extremely affected parts of the system? I’m wondering if there might be royal-std, royal-xtreme (in the ewld days ewnlaih) and ‘BBC’: the bbc speech of the great newsreaders. Educated people nowadays who speak the south-of-England prestige language form wouldn’t be seen dead talking plummy or living in hyziz unless it were for the purposes of satire.

I can’t read phonetics textbooks because of the use of RP as a reference, do they really expect cat to rhyme with vet? For me coming from the midlands/north cat rhymes with château, chat and Katze and ScG cat ([kʰaʰt̪]), not with ketchup.

It’s a very important point about the influence of peers. I’m sure that’s true for me.

[sevenlayermuddle]

I don’t particularly care for RP, or traditional BBC.   What I do like to hear is “well spoken English”, that basically pronounces each word in its entirety with at least a token gesture at each vowel and consonant, regardless of accent.

For example, anytime I accidentally select a program on iPlayer, that turns out to have been made for BBC3, the dialogue seems to be utterly devoid of consonants.  That to me is not an accent, it is just poor speech.  It would probably have been corrected in my childhood days by intervention of parents or if parents failed, friends’ parents, or schoolteachers would have advised us of our errors.

Then again, accurate pronunciation is not always as easy as expected, as in the town of Milngavie, near where I was born.   Correct pronunciation is “Mull-guy”.   There are many other examples in Scotland, and elsewhere in UK.

A valid criticism of many Glaswegian speaking habits, and I am very guilty here, is to speak too fast and omit the space between words.   When challenged, I defend myself on the basis that “I speak faster than you, because my brain is faster than yours”.   That is rarely challenged, but it may simply be because nobody understands  me when I say it.

[kitz]

am not convinced that the queen sounds the same as BBC TV announcers,

I agree she doesn't - Which is why I used the term URP or Upper Received Pronunciation as opposed to RP.

[Weaver]

Milngavie is not too bad an attempt at a phonetic spelling of what it truly is which is surely just Muileann Gaoithe (windmill) although the Stòr-Dàta has "-Dhaibhidh". But what do I know. The second is a better phonetic match but that could just be folk etymology at work.

A perfect example of pronunciation becoming blurred in fact. This is Gaelic of 700+ years ago and the -th- in that environment would have been pronounced back then but it is now silent. Modern Gaelic is far more blurred compared to back then, with lenited consonants having been weakened so much in some cases that they are now completely lost. The spelling however has not changed so is very archaic rather than truly phonetic now, just like English. Cathy-Ann Nic a’ Phì sings "Chì mi ‘n geamhradh agus a’ ghaoth" on her cd of which that is the title if you would like superbly crystal clear Eilean Bharraigh pronunciation.

Anyway, everyone without exception was Gaelic-speaking around 800-900 years ago in the greater Glasgow area north of the Clyde if Welsh had died out and the few Norse speakers were gone.

[sevenlayermuddle]

The point about Milngavie is, it is not on a Gaelic-speaking Island community. Or even a mainland Gaelic community.   It is close to the centre of Glasgow, where language, including place names, is about as Anglicised as it can get. 

Gaelic origin may indeed explain the history but I feel safe in asserting that, at time of my upbringing,  Milngavie was seen as an anomaly by 99% of the Glasgow population, who saw themselves as purely English speakers, albeit with a unique accent of which we were rather proud.

Interestingly,  Wikipedia (today) has to say...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milngavie

There are many Scots names for the town. In fact, even within single texts such as the Records of the Parliament of Scotland, different variants are used alongside each other (Mylnedavie, Mylnegaivie, Milnegaivie and Milngaivie).[9] Joan Blaeu's Atlas of Scotland shows some Scots spellings for well-known places which indicate some of their origins: Milngavie is shown as Milgay ("ay" being a Scots spelling of [ae̯], cf. aye and the original pronunciation of MacKay), possibly meaning "Mill of Guy".[10] An alternative suggestion is that the original translation meant "Gavin's Mill", and indeed Gavin's Mill remains in the town centre to this day. The most recently published name is Mulguy, although the author (Billy Kay) admits that while academically researched, some entries in his work on place names may be controversial.[11]

[Weaver]

As well as school friends, further strong influence came from being in York where I carefully learned to imitate the incredibly strong and delicious East Yorkshire accent of the cheerful cleaners especially one shouting in delight at the top of her voice one morning /ævˈrɪl # # ævˈrɪl # ɪzˈpɪsɪnɪz ˈsɪŋkʰ/  which I will decode if you’re really stuck.

School friends and others in the local environment have a strong effect on some people but not others, that’s my feeling. But surely young children at school must all be affected.

Do children want to sound like their peers or like their parents ? Surely the former is cool and the latter possibly the reverse.

But considering very young children, they must sound like mum more than father, no? What do you think?

And not to forget grandparents as I was reminded earlier. That was true for me. I had my father’s dear mother with me all the time and I happily used to imitate grandmother practicing some of the more unusual utterances of hers.

[22over7]

It's not just accent, it's grammar.  From my mother, I've a lot of "Aye, that'll be right!", "you'll have had yer tea" etc, and such stuff in the future subjunctive/pluperfect, or whatever it's called. I can't do the Doric accent for nuts, but I find it delicious when I'm among her branch of the family. To me, a weirdly congenial East Coast take on "the future". Fit like.

[sevenlayermuddle]

Agreed, 22over7.

One of my favourite bits of Glaswegian is on a fridge magnet in our kitchen.   We’ve had it for ages, not sure where it came from, it reads:

“GONAENODAETHAT”

Perfectly meaningful, concise and to the point, it brings back happy memories of frequent advice given to me as a child.

[Weaver]

The actual modern pronunciation may just be very very old. If it is muileann gaoithe then that would fit very well. Written forms can be very wrong while locals’ traditional pronunciation is the truth. Take Falkirk and Kirkwall both with their bogus l’s, because people thought they were restoring lost ls that were the fault of the l-dropping plebs (like should, could, would where the ls are real but no longer pronounced). So Falkirk is the real old form, and Kirkwall is Kirkjuvagr = Kirkuk + vagr . British aka Welsh ‘Eccles Brith’ was translated into Gaelic ‘An Eaglais Bhreac’ (one of a number of examples of evidence for bilingual competence Welsh-Gaelic and vice versa, Glasgow itself being one) and that name is still used by Gaelic speakers today. The word ‘breac’ Meaning speckled was translated into Scots ‘faw’ then mangled in English. The whole area is teeming with Welsh and Gaelic placenames, East Lothian being the exception, where a few very old English names are found, but even there there as Far East as you like there still are both Welsh (eg tranent it seems to me) and Gaelic names eg ‘An Garbh Allt’ which is to the south east of Haddington if I remember correctly.

[sevenlayermuddle]

Hmm, in my generation of Glaswegian, my own family at least, Falkirk and Kirkwall were pronounced pretty much as you would expect, from the spelling.   

A town not a million miles from me nowadays is called Kingston Bagpuize.  Pronunciation varies, and very few people have lived nearby for long enough to have an indisputable opinion.   But readers of the forum might be pleased to hear it is very often, if not most often,  pronounced as to rhyme with ‘cat’, ie Bag Pus.

[Weaver]

@7lm Indeed re Kirkwall and Falkirk the spelling has been so influential that people in previous generations saw it and thought it was correct obviously or even thought that their own pronunciation was incorrect. That is part of the way language changes, mistakes becoming recognised as orthodoxy.

Currently the use of ‘of’ In ‘he could of done it’ wants to make me scream, but in time it may become recognised widely. I’m sure that some ignorant uneducated working class people in eg Manchester don’t know how wrong it is.

Another thing that is driving me crazy is ‘online’ and ‘go online’. The second one first. No one ‘goes online’ any more since modern modems are always left switched on all the time. That came from the days of dialup where someone clicked on something in a web browser and the o/s did initiate dialup if needed, so it really went on-line, you didn’t. But the association is clear. (There is even a name for this in linguistics which I have forgotten - the textbook example is ‘another coffee for number seven’ and ‘Downing Street issued an announcement’.) the clicking in the browser got associated with achieving an internet connection and then the correctly used phrase going online got back-associated with clicking on a link and going to a web page. Then it got transferred to ‘using the web’ and then ‘anything associated with the web’ or finally ‘something ON the web. This final step involved confusion between on/off in the original online as opposed to offline and on the locative preposition as in on the shelf so it became a locative instead of on/off. The other old sense of being connected not being connected ‘are you online’ might still be heard occasionally? Don’t know. Adjectival usage meaning ‘associated with the web’ as in ‘online banking’ ‘online auction site’ is the only one that I can stand in fact I actively approve of the latter adjectival one. But again no one ‘goes online’ any more as in dial up what they should be saying is ‘goes to/visits the site x’ or ‘uses the web’ or ‘uses x (web) browser’ - horrible things like ‘just go online and see our shop/site’ uuurgh. (All the Celtic languages have been guilty of calquing the adjectival (least offensive) ‘online’ as in ‘online dictionary’ but it looks vile eg ScG air loidhne even using the English loan ’loidhne’ as if Gaelic did not have a word for a line as in cable - the correct form would be ‘air a’ www’ or ‘air an eader-lìon’, or ‘ceangailte’ maybe plus other material. It’s all down to idiot translators thinking in English or wanting to get an exact word-for-word equivalent and feeling that somehow they ought to be able to exactly match syntactical structures/patterns.)

Coming back to the ‘i should of done it’ nightmare. Gaelic has exactly the same thing more than once even as far back as 1200 years ago with monks getting the words ‘do’ meaning ‘to’ mixed up with the word ‘de’ meaning ‘of’ and occasionally ‘off’. Back then and to this day in some areas people (eg horrible Lewis Gaelic for one, but by absolutely no means the only area, so quite unfair to pick on them) horribly mispronounce the second one so that it is almost identical to the first. And even back then in ancient times one sees the incorrect form ‘do’ written, instead of ‘de’ which shows clearly that they were thinking in phonetic terms not in terms of meaning and writing in phonetic terms. I believe I have discovered another stranger one in those ancient times in Old Irish that has survived until today in both Irish and modern ScG but that is a story for another day. This incredibly boring and wholly uncalled for diatribe will have to stop somewhere. I can only beg your forgiveness.

[sevenlayermuddle]

You’re not alone re ‘he could of done it’, I cringe every time I hear it.  Or indeed when I see it, as it has become so much the norm that people even use it in writing.

My other pet hate is...

Bartender:  What would you like?
Customer: Can I get a pint of beer?

The correct answer would surely be ‘No, customers are not allowed behind the bar’.  But I never hear that.