I’m Czech. It is quite common that pre-school children have some kind of speech disorder. Like proper pronouncing of S, Z, C, distinguishing between L and R or the ultimate phone boss – Ř. A lot of kids are going to logopedics doctor to learn to actually speak their mother tongue properly. How common is it in your country? Do children struggle often to speak their native language?
EDIT: Corrected ‘vowel’ to ‘phone’
EDIT 2: By ‘quite common’ I mean like like one third, but I don’t have a data proof, it’s only my personal observation
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I had the same case here in Slovenia. Not sure about It being common
I went to a logopedician all throughout primary school. The therapist had an office inside the school. But from 600-700 students, there were only like 4-5 students going to the logopedician. My mom now works at my old school and she told me the office has been long closed. I don’t think it’s that common anymore in Romania although it used to be a service offered by the state.
No. Some children have problems, but I guess they would have them in every language. Something like a lisp or Stutter.
Idk about speech impediments as such, but there’s something about Danish children on average learning to talk perfect Danish and complete sentences etc at a later age than in many other countries with whatever languages they speak, for the reason that Danish is just hard and it’s tricky to learn. I think it has something to do with the amount of vowel sounds… I remember practicing my alphabet as a small child and my older sibling consistently taunting me because my Æ’s sounded like A’s lol
I am not sure how common it is but it is not uncommon. To add to your list of problematic sounds, kids in Poland sometimes say ś instead of sz or ź instead of ż.
Belgium, French-speaking, it seems like every kid we know has a speech therapist, not just foreigners, either.
It’s quite common in France too, they go to the Orthophoniste.
They help with pronunciation but also other issues like difficulties to swallow/eat or to properly connect their hand to their vision.
It’s not rare in Finland. My kid met with somebody two or three times, as he had trouble producing the Finnish R-sound. He got some tasks to practise at home and eventually learned the correct sound.
The most common speech disorder among Hungarian children is pronouncing the “R” like the French do instead of rolling it like the Spanish.
In Wales you don’t have to say the proper pronunciation of “LL” until you’re older, getting away with a “CL” instead (which is how we also allow English people to say it).
The “LL” is like a “HL” but throw in a hiss. Not very easy to do. Not sure we’ll call it an impediment that it takes longer to learn though.
All children have difficulty with some sounds early in life. They figure them out at different rates, and in the UK we don’t medicalise this completely normal phenomenon. It’s not a speech disorder.
The R is the most common issue!
I had issues with Both R and S, so I went to a logopediatrician (?) for a year or 2?
It’s also highly dialect dependent. Like plenty of people with the «skarre-r» cannot say the «rolling-r» as their dialect never uses it.
I’d say in 10 kids there are at least one or two. I had issues with s and sch, so did my classmate in a classroom of 12 kids. My mom couldn’t pronounce the R sound as a kid. these two issues are the most common and usually fixed in primary school. The teachers have to inform the parents and the “Logo-peadic”-visits are mandatory in my area.
In Serbian few sounds can be a problem, but most common is probably the “r”.
I grew up in Germany so no logoped for Slavic sounds and Im stuck with the German “r”, cant pronounce the Serbian correctly.
Ive never encountered anybody in Serbia with the same problem and Ive not heard people going to the speech therapist (back in the day).
Its more common now, I know several people whos kids went to one.
If you treat Ř as a vowel then this is a serious disorder 🤣🤣
I’d say same in Lithuania. Kids usually have some trouble pronouncing r, as well as š, č, ž. Some need only excercise at home, others need proffesional help. But I think ALL kids at a certain age have problems with at least r sound. 😅
No offence, but reading some posts here, it’s so funny – adults invent an unspeakable language that kids cannot easily master, and just continue the cycle of suffering. I like some examples when linguists reformed their languages, reducing sounds and simplifying grammar. While it is a sensitive issue of the national identity, it just helps next generations to be more effective and successful.
There are people in Finland who can’t say our R properly, also adults. Our former president Tarja Halonen is one of them.
Haha, when I saw the title of your post, I wondered if the OP was a Czech citizen complaining about the rhotacismus bohemicus…
Problems with R-sound are pretty common. The R of estonian language is very sharp and harsh so it’s physically quite difficult to create that sound, lots of children struggle and getting logopedics help is common.
It happens yep. Especially with the R, G and combinations like ‘sch’, ‘schr’, the difference between Z and S, and F vs V.
But still, words like ‘angstschreeuw’ are hard for nearly everyone.
I have had logopedics mainly because I’m hard of hearing, approx 80dB loss around 1kHz. I remember practicing nearly all consonants since I can barely hear them. Nowadays people say they can’t hear that I’m HoH, as my speech is apparently pretty good.
The most common issue is pronouncing the R correctly and I remember going to a speech therapist as a kid because of that
Difficulties to pronounce the R sound are fairly common, both among children and adults
I can’t find any real data but by personal experience i think it does happen quite often. Most commonly it’s R and sometimes S. I for one never fully got over my problems with the letter R.
Not here in Romania.
We do have referrals to speech and language therapy but it would usually be for fairly serious speech disorders that are actually impacting development and communication, not usually just mispronunciation.
English by and large isn’t that hard to pronounce and the accent variations are big enough that a lot of quite fundamental differences in certain sounds are just understood rather than seen as incorrect. Even in England normal, clear speech in your own accent has replaced stuffy and artificial sounding RP in media etc a long time ago.
If you went back several decades, elocution (later called speech and drama) lessons outside school weren’t uncommon here in Ireland, especially in some of the more stuck up schools. A lot of that was about pronunciation and diction. I remember them well myself!— you had to present, and project and annunciate and learn how to deliver poetry and drama etc — sort of halfway between speech development and stage school. There were even regional poetry reading competitions!
I knew someone who was in speech therapy, but I think it’s not common in general, but it’s common for children with speech disorders or impediments.
Finland.
I remember quite many kids in our class attended weekly/biweekly speech therapy to correct their pronounciation of S, R / L, K / G and D / T. For me what I find funny is that in some dialects of Finnish these letters are pronounced differently anyways, but for some reason they want to make sure the kids can speak the standard Finnish no matter what.
I don’t know how common it is, but growing up I did have two or three classmates who went to a logopediatrician to help them pronounce the Hungarian “r” correctly or the “s” sound more clearly as some people tend to pronounce it between “sh” and “s”, which even has its own name “sejpítés” kind of similar to the English word “lisping”.
The last sound children tend to learn is the “th” sound, which they usually won’t master until they’re about 6 or 7.
(And plenty of working class people will never master it, but it’s not usually considered a speech defect for them).
Otherwise the most common speech defects are usually lisps (or indeed, lithpth) and people who pronounce the letter r as a w.
https://youtu.be/OMtoGj0dcSo?si=210GvAJGxlEqmOsz
That’s very interesting. What happened in the past? I mean, 150 years ago for example, i don’t think children could go to a logopedics doctor. Did they eventually overcome the difficulties on their own and speak Czech perfectly?
This is not common.
Not sure about the exact percentage, but yeah, many kids can’t pronounce R (sometimes L) properly. Sometimes č, ć, ž, š, etc.
Usually it’s corrected by the time they reach adulthood, but not always, for example I have a friend who’s almost 30 and he still can’t roll his R…
I am greek, I did go to a speech therapist because I couldn’t pronounce the letter r but I think that I was in a minority and it is not super common here.
the kids in kindergarten were asking me to pronounce “porta”(meaning door) and I had no idea why.
What’s an abortion called in your country? Cancelled Czech
I’ve a cleft because of that I had a speech disorder. I was the first two yearsin school on a special school for people with speech disorder. I mean beside the typical syntax stuff German is mostly quite forward how you pronounce it. but yeah “nuscheln” is quite commen.
I am portuguese and i know of a case where a child cannot pronouce the “rr” correctly and i think may the “ort”