The le''er 'T'

Oh yes.

It was a characteristic of London English, but has now spread to other areas. Sometimes known as ‘glottalisation’. Very irritating!

You be-er get used to i-

Yes - p’etty awful ?

No’ arf.

Yes, it’s T-glottalisation but I suspect we all do it to a certain extent. Cotton, mitten, kitten. It is hot today. Gatwick. I rarely hear anyone say the airport name with a clear T sound.

I think we find it harder to aspirate certain consonants depending on where they are in the word and when one word ends with a consonant and the next word starts with a consonant e.g. Start your engines. I can’t jump.

I joke about dropping t's to my grandchildren and we say 'butter is better than bitter for bellies'. They do speak very well at the moment (primary school) but this may change as they get older. In fact one of them told me off for dropping a t once which made me laugh.

If there were a Society for the Abolition of Glottal Stops, SAGS, I'd be a paid up member. It's not a sound I ever make in English, and it annoys me to hear it.

Perhaps that should be SAGSIE, as there are other languages where the stop is used correctly.

Ger over i"

Drives me mad too. We were made to repeat our words at school until we pronounced them correctly. I suppose that's abuse now.

I still hear proper 'T' around here. The ones that don't use them are arrivals from the south. Strange really they don't sound there 'T', and then stick an 'R' in grass, bath, path etc..

I will start to listen for cotton, mitten, kitten. I certainly sound the 't' and so do my DGC.

I don’t wish to sound harsh, but I’m a bit sick of people criticising the way other people speak.

Your accent and dialect is very much a lottery, dependant upon your parents; where you grew up and went to school.

It’s very difficult, I should imagine, to alter one’s accent.
And much of the time (if not all the time) it appears to be class related.

I have a Black Country accent (despite having lived in the East Midlands and Yorkshire for the past thirty years).

The Birmingham and Black Country accents are consistently called ‘the worst / most disliked in Britain’.

There was a report in the papers yesterday saying that people who speak as I do are believed to be the least intelligent ie. the most stupid .

If that’s not bigoted s***e, I don’t know what is.

Yes. I am wholeheartedly sick of it!

Your penultimate sentence does not help the case you are trying to make., Fanny Cornforth.

Friend of mine manages to drop the t in Waitrose. How is that even possible?

eazybee

Your penultimate sentence does not help the case you are trying to make., Fanny Cornforth.

I was expressing anger eazybee.
Swearing is not a measure of intelligence.

Yes - very irritating and lazy speech.

I had to take down somebodies name whilst working the other day, I wrote it down as KE Simpson!

I have to say it makes me cringe when I hear 't' missed out but this is partly due to the fact my mother made me go to elocution classes when I was about 5 or 6. Missing out the 't' I think makes spoken sentences difficult to understand - and the English language is quite complicated enough already!

It hasn't yet reached the NE, thank heaven, though we do have a small tendency to fink and fank..

(I see that the potty mouth vigilantes are active.
commiserations FannyC)

Language evolves. I ain’t bovvered bro, innit.

Another NorthEasterner here and I think we are still pronouncing our ‘T’ where there is one. Sorry FC but we have one of the most trusted accents, which is why a lot of call centres are sited up here. Mind you, broad Geordie is almost unintelligible!!! I haven’t noticed ‘th’ being replaced by ‘f’ here, but when one TV Chaser offers a contestant Firty Fousand Pounds, that grates on me.

I often think that TV/radio presenters must have been told to drop Ts on purpose, in order to sound more ‘ordinary’ - or less ‘posh’. I particularly suspect the Beeb - usually anxious to appeal to what they like to call ‘ordinary’ people. (i.e. not like them!)

nandad

Friend of mine manages to drop the t in Waitrose. How is that even possible?

Best laugh I’ve had all morning!

H gets dropped just as much. A woman relative told me she was brought up in Oxton which I couldn't find and turned out to be Hoxton.