Vocal Voices

A Teesside headmistress wants her pupils to speak standard English without losing their Teesside accent by cutting out the use of slang.

She has a point. Whereas accents and dialects enrich the language, slang debases it. However, going forward, I would like her to get ahead of the curve and step up to the plate with an ongoing campaign to reduce, by up to 50%, the use of mangled management speak, especially in the media - mainly the BBC.

I wish she would teach them all to pronounce th properly. So many TV "stars" say f instead of th and it is almost becoming the norm in certain circles.

I love accents, and I love regional words but I hate hate hate people using f instead of th.

Oh yes definitely for the written word, but please keep regional accents!!!

Although that 'gangsta' speak that a lot of young men seem to adopt has me grimacing Urrrghhh!!!

Even news readers now have been known to leave out the second "f" in fifth which annoys me also the first "c" in arctic. But what a difference if you listen to a recording of a news broadcast from many years ago

Regional accents are lovely, but mangled grammar is not Sloppy English is rife "Bored of" instead of "Bored with" and "Two times " instead of "Twice".........that kind of thing

I know I am refering to the written word, but I wonder how many school children know that a clause is a group of words containing a finite verb, but making incomplete sense. Was taught that by a very good English teacher. We did a few lessons on dialect and the derivative of words. An example is the name "entwistle" This originally meant someone living in the "twistle" This is the "Y2 where two roads met. There are many other examples.
I like dialects but strongly object to lazy pronunciation.

Workingman wrote:Don't say "nowt".

Yer wot? Yer don't get owt for nowt - everyone who is anyone knows that.

Gal wrote:Although that 'gangsta' speak that a lot of young men seem to adopt has me grimacing Urrrghhh!!!

Indeed, there's a whole culture grown up in Sarf (sorry, Rodo - South ) London which is quite alien.

The question of accents and language can get blurred, though. Brummie, for example, is primarily an accent, but Black Country is a dialect with its own words - and I assume the same applies to areas of Yorkshire. Do you preserve the Black Country vocabulary as a piece of history?

However, nice as it is to preserve historical differences, at the end of the day, if you don't teach children language and communication skills properly, you'll start to lose cohesion in society.

We got the Look North version up here. The head is not trying to get rid of accents or dialects, she wants her pupils to talk in plain standard English. She does not want everyone to speak like Angela Rippon or Brian Sewell.

"Gissa job" or "Give me a job" can both be said in a Teesside accent, but one is more preferable than the other.

I am going for "Give me a job" but I would add "Please, pretty please".

Sither, sithee, cock, flower, duck, hen, hun, love or sunshine would not replace Sir or Ma'am.

My youngest grandchildren spent the first few years of their lives in FIFE in an area which does not come with good spoken language of any type.

My Grandson was playing with his Nintendo DS and trying to use the voice commands on his dog program. He was supposed to say SIT and it was supposed to sit down. In fact SIT in FIFE is said si UH. When I got tired of it I reminded him that SIT has a T in it and he has to stress the T. I'd had it with increasingly strident SIUH SIUH SIUH SIUH. The second he said sit with a T he moved on.

Horrible accent FIFE. Most people can't understand it....