'T as D' in contemporary British English:
'What are you going to tell your daughter ?'
Say the above sentence, out loud, or silently. If you're an American, Canadian, Irish, Australian, New Zealander, or South African speaker of English, or basically a speaker from anywhere
other than Britain, then you probably pronounced these letters basically the same way:
What are you going to tell your daughter ?
If British, then you likely, but by no means certainly may have pronounced, as one might logically expect, the following the same way:
What are you going to tell your daughter ?
Given that our systems of spelling are based, however loosely, on the pronunciation of the words at the time the spelling was codified (though how we came up with 'ch' I will never understand), presumably the latter is the earlier and more 'original' form. And yet one, that seems to be nearing extinction as the more 'American' pronunciation becomes more and more common throughout Britain with every passing year.
I never used to notice it much, but once I did, I couldn't stop hearing it, seemingly everywhere. When I heard David Cameron (descendant of royalty, and graduate of Eton and Oxford) talking in various speeches about 'the Briddish people', 'Briddish innovation', 'the Briddish economy', and the like, in a way that I could never imagine hearing from the lips of Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher, I suspected that perhaps this was on the advice of some media consultant to make him sound 'less posh.' But I could be wrong. Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of a universal linguistic shift in English pronunciation. The ubiquity of this pronunciation throughout the rest of the English speaking world suggests as much. And yet when did this shift start ? When in Britain, and when in the former colonies ? Was it people of a particular place or class in Britain who took this habit around the world, or a spontaneous shift that took place across the globe, and is only latterly now conquering Britain ?
