A few weeks ago, I came back from work to find my young daughter waiting for me in the hallway. She had a mischievous look on her face. She greeted me and laughed. As I manoeuvred my bike into the house, she asked me to say butterfly. So I did. “Butterfly,” I said. “Daddy,” she squealed, trying to suppress a laugh. “It’s pronounced buTTerfly, not bu-uh-fly.”
She ran off laughing hysterically. Almost as if she couldn’t believe her luck that I had fallen into her trap.
This is her new trick – to make fun of my accent. If I don’t enunciate, if I pronounce something in a way she is not familiar with, if I allude to a regional accent that is not the one in her surrounding area, she will make her feelings known.
I’ve got a fairly generic London accent, which involves the dropping of “t”s and the use of innit as a full stop. And now my daughter corrects me all the damn time. In the same way my mum used to.
It first started when she asked how old I was. I told her: “I’m 37 years old.” She said: “Thur-eee? Not thur-eee. ThirTy. Thir-tee.” She shook her head at me in disappointment, frustrated that I couldn’t get my basic pronunciation right.
I could hear my mum in her, trying to force me to speak English properly. Mum’s fear was that if I didn’t speak English in a proper plummy posh voice, people would use it as an opportunity to remind me I wasn’t from here. She had many anxieties like this. My sister and I had to change out of our school uniforms the second we came home. She didn’t want our clothes to smell of her cooking. “Everyone will say you stink of curry. Do not give them any ammunition,” she would say.
If I told her I was heading to the park to play football, she would stress the “t”. Foot-ball. Not fu-baw. Or however I pronounce it. Strangely, Mum was always fine with innit. Probably because she used it herself, innit.
My daughter’s obsession with my dropped “t”s is becoming wearing. I find myself watching everything I say. And by everything, I mean e-ver-y-thing, not every-fing.
Last Sunday, I was making a coffee and she was playing by herself. I heard her, in a makeshift den, under a blanket, talking to her teddy bear, Maple. She was whispering: ‘We’re going to a party… party, party, party… Not parr-eee. Par-Tee.”
I asked her what was wrong. “You talk funny,” she said. “You say peanuh bu-uhr. It’s peanut butter.” “That’s just my accent,” I told her.
I tried to explain the concept of accents to her. Especially as she’s growing up in Bristol and starting to develop some quaint West Country inflections, like her pronunciation of the number two. It sounds like it has an extra “w” on the end. She also sometimes adds a doing word to the end of her sentences. “I’m going to the park, I am” or “You pronounce things funny, you do.”
She refused to accept she had an accent. She told me she sounds like herself. Which is true. But I wanted to impress on her the importance of accepting that people say things in different ways and there’s no one correct way to speak. Because I certainly felt that pressure from my mum growing up. To speak correctly. To erase any sense of myself or my immigrant background from my voice. To my mum, it was important that I sounded proper. Whatever that meant. And I want my daughter to appreciate difference, to not want us all to conform to one voice.
As we rode my bike to nursery one morning, I asked her again about her obsession with my accent. “Daddy has an accent,” I told her. “I’m from London. You have an accent, too. You sound like you’re from Bristol.” She laughed. I told her again why it’s important to embrace people’s difference, and she replied: “Important not impor-unt.”
