Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Dominic? British Accent?
6-FEB-2008:
One of the most common questions asked by friends and relatives was "So, does Dominic speak with a British accent?". One would think that it is reasonable to assume that a child would grow up with a British accent just because he has lived in Britain for 2 years even though he mainly speaks to his parents who not only do not speak with a British accent but rather grammatically-wrong English most of the time. ;-)
Well, what can I say? It's hard to tell, really. I think all young children who have recently learnt to talk, speak the same way - with their own accent. Besides, Dominic doesn't speak more than one sentence at a time and his sentences are made up of a maximum of only 4 words. However, I've been paying attention to him lately and I noticed that he likes to emphasize certain consonants, such as the 't' in 'wet'. Some examples I've listed here (those that I can recall):
- Very strong 't' sound in words like - wet, sit, shirt, cat ...
- Very strong 'p' sound as well in words like - up, soup, stop, drop ...
- Likes to emphasize the 'ch' sound in words like - much, couch, ouch, bridge ...
- And the 'k' or 'g' as well such as - neck, big, sick, egg ...
Based on my experience, I'd say that Malaysians (Chinese in particular) will tend to de-emphasize the 't' and 'p' in those words making them sound like 'wed' instead of 'wet' or 'stob' instead of 'stop', but not my son. Nor would any Chinese fella say 'egg' with the slight 'guh' at the end of the word.
Dominic also likes to use expresions like 'oops', 'ouch' and 'oh dear' ... I imagine he must have picked those up from the TV or at the nursery.
Some say that a mother will always understand what her child is saying no matter how inaccurate the child pronounces those words, but not me. I'm struggling to meet Dominic's demands everyday. It was only yesterday that we were playing Lego and he wanted me to build a tunnel. I picked up the word 'build' but only the 'tunnel' doesn't sound like 'tunnel' at all. 'Tower'? 'Tall'? What do you want? Dominic was getting more frustrated by the second. When I built him a tower, he kicked and threw it away ... irritated. When I scolded him for his behaviour, he started crying. When he finally calmed down, he said 'dark tunnel'. It was when I picked up the word 'dark' that I understood he meant 'tunnel'. Phew! It was tough.
Finally, two things I'm happy about today:
1) I'm happy that daddy is also working from home today.
2) I'm happy that it's finally CNY eve today.
