Speech – I’m raising a pirate!

My first child is quite well spoken on the whole and has a rich vocabulary and is very articulate. He often surprises me with his choice of words and the order in which he uses them in a sentence. His speech has quite an old fashioned quality from a by gone era.

When someone gives a statement that he agrees with he will often respond with ‘indeed’.

Recently whilst out walking he commented that I was finding it hard to push his sister as it was ‘quite a steep incline.’ Not really what you expect from a 3 year old.

I was quite hot on modelling good speech for him and making him repeat words he was pronouncing/using incorrectly.

My husband has a significantly stronger east end accent than I do and although I love our accent (not necessarily the sound but everything it represents to me – mainly home) I want my children to be able to dip in and out of our accent when the situation dictates.

Naively, I assumed that when our daughter started to speak that she would be like her brother. After all I had ensured I did exactly the same things as I had with him. How wrong I was.

For a start she has quite a deep, gravelly voice. Nothing wrong with that, it may come in useful when she is older for voice overs or the like. Secondly her accent is very pronounced. She makes the cast of EastEnders sound quite posh! She drops all of the initial sounds on words and runs one word into another without any pauses. She also makes lots of ‘ah’ ‘aye’ and ‘gah’ noises.

I had been voicing my concerns for her speech to my husband for a few weeks as her vocabulary grew.

The defining moment came when the phone rang and she answered it with a ‘arrow’ we looked at each other and burst out laughing with a knowing smile. We were raising a pirate! Give the girl a parrot on her shoulder and a cutlass in her hand and she would have fitted right in as an extra in Pirates of the Caribbean.

If I want my daughter to have the ability to dip in and out of her accent when she wants to, we have a very long way to go/I best start saving for eloquent lessons now. She is very much Eliza Doolittle at the start of My fair lady and may well require the services of a Professor Higgins if she has any hope of transforming into Eliza Doolittle at the end of the film!

#speech #modellingspeech #pirate #Eastenders #accent #vocabulary #teachbabytospeak