speech deteriorating

My son, who has just turned 4 used to have pretty good pronunciation - when I was given a list of when certain sounds were usually learnt, I was surprised to find that he had all by 3 and a bit when the norm wasn't until approaching 6. But in the last couple of months, his vocabulary is still increasing and the complexity of what he says is the same or more complex, but the sound of it has gone quite bad at times, to the extent we have a lot of trouble understanding what he is saying, when previously we could hear what he was saying, but not always what he was meaning. One factor is he seemed to have acquired the habit of putting 2 fingers in his mouth, he never did suck his thumb or fingers, I think he's picked up this habit from his little sister, who has 2 fingers practically glued into her mouth - this is soluble, we just remind him to take them out before speaking, but even then, there are still some random sounds being produced, still soluble, we remind him to speak properly and mostly he does.

I would expect him to have some change of accent due to moving from the UK to the US, but very few of the sounds he produces sound American to me, they sound Indian - hardly surprising in our neighbourhood, but in the long term it is a worry to me, if we can't understand him, then others probably won't either.

Last year, he was the only native English speaker in his preschool class, I was totally happy with that, but looking back, it probably is the main place he's been exposed to a consistent non American accent. He's signed up for preschool at the same place next year and the class will probably be a little more mixed, as it's a morning class - the afternoon classes seem to be less popular and then have space for people moving into the area, the vast majority of which are Indian.

I'm also starting to be a little anxious about school, I'm guessing over 50% will have English as a 2nd language, I'm concerned this will be troublesome when it comes to making friends and also for the long term development of his own speech capabilities.

I'm confused as to whether I'm being over anxious about this and he'll gradually settle on an accent that is a mix but understandable. I've also not heard great things about schools where large numbers don't have English spoken at home, but I wondered if this was associated with poverty more than the actual language issues and this area is fairly affluent, less affluent than most of the localish neighbourhoods, but well above the poverty line.

Anne
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