Why do some African American people say aks instead of ask?

Same reason some colonials say “wourder” instead of “water”.
It is how they were misraised.

It’s rather like a cultural accent.

Here in the US, language and accents are cultural. There are so many ways to pronounce every possible English word here. And this is a good thing. (Also, this is relevant to that word.)

It is a part of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a dialect of American English spoken by a large proportion of African Americans. Many scholars hold that AAVE, like several English creoles, developed from contacts between nonstandard varieties of colonial English and African languages. It remains in several ways similar to current nonstandard dialects spoken by white Americans, especially American Southern English.

Culture. You can’t blame the education system.

Bad schooling. It’s things like this that caused us to take our kid out of public school into private.

No Chestnut. Parents and culture have far more influence on people’s grammar than schools do. Ebonics is proof of that. Schools did not teach them to say “Ax.” Schools don’t teach kids to say things like “We was,” or “I seen…” Their home life and culture did.

There’s no knowing exactly why that specific sound change occurred; the mutation of /sk/ with /ks/ is a known sound change that has occurred in other languages and it happened to occur in AAVE (apparently it also occurred in Cajun dialects), which is why you hear many African Americans say it. AAVE as a whole is stigmatized as sounding uneducated, along with other American English dialects like Southern or Boston.

A dialect here in the US.

It sounds uneducated, because the word is not spelled that way. Some mispronunciations, accents, or dialects develop from illiteracy or first languages other than English. I don’t know what led to this particular pronunciation, but it drives my husband crazy when he hears it. He has no patience for it, because it is so common it is like they have no idea it is incorrect and these are people born and raised in America, not someone who came here learning English as a second language.

For the record, plenty of words are pronounced more than one way and both ways are acceptable, but “aks” isn’t seen as acceptable by most people outside of the community that uses it. Just like “yous guys” isn’t going to help you get a job at a Fortune 500 company.

@Dutchess III Schools should correct such wrong pronunciations, again why private school is so much better than public. That has been proven time and time again.

They do correct them @Chestnut. They correct them over and over and over. Then they go home and that’s how their parents and friends talk.

They do not even teach correct english.
It is spelled “colour”, dammit.

Rudyard Kipling and AA Milne really messed up my American English spelling!

@Chestnut Seriously? Do you live in the Bible Belt by any chance? I heard things like that when I lived there. Most of America attends or attended public school, and most of America does not say aks. You have to be from a place fairly segregated to think that. Just curious are the white kids who go to the public schools saying aks?

@JLeslie No, where I live is as diverse as they come where my daughter speaks German, and I have heard white kids say aks before, yes.

Dialects are a part of every language.
People from southern France speak differently then people from northern France.

There are people from China that came to America decades ago, moved to Louisiana (for some reason) and now speak with English southern accents.

@Chestnut Your daughter speaks German. What does that have to do with the discussion? You mean she speaks German not English? I wasn’t trying to say there aren’t any white kids who use that dialect, but on the whole, it’s cultural. People tend to speak like their surroundings. It’s why I say cawfee when I’m with my parents.

As far as schools, if you have crappy public schools where you live that does not speak for all public schools.

@JLeslie She speaks 3 languages, English, Chinese, and German, all properly. Oh, and you are so right…. public schools here are a joke.

@Chestnut Where are you?

I had my oldest in private schools from 2nd to 6th grade. Couldn’t afford it for the younger kids. I honestly didn’t see any difference in their educations.

It’s cultural. In my family, we say worsh for wash. I don’t know where it came from.

For the same reason some white folk say “sigh-reen” instead of “sighren.”

My dad was born into poverty in Texas. After he graduated from TT with an EE degree and started moving in the professional world he had to drop his Southern way of talking.
It came out every now and again though.
Mom was born into poverty too.
My folks were sticklers about grammar and pronunciation.

Everyone saying it’s cultural is correct. Problem is, some cultures are valued more than others by the white majority.

Italians say sang-a-which for sandwich, it’s funny.

New Yorkers say cauw-fee for coffee, it’s adorable, like Fran Drescher.

Some folks from the South might say see-ment for cement or tate-ess for potatoes, but it’s charming.

I say cah for car but I’m quirky like Cliff from Cheers.

Blacks say aks for ask though, and they’re uneducated hoodlums.

It’s about how you hear words in your very young life. I pronounced Salmon just like it is spelled until I was in high school. Someone corrected me. I didn’t believe her but looked it up, and sure enough…... For me, that made me understand than after you learn the language it is hard to unlearn because you don’t even hear the people around you pronouncing words differently than you.

Relevant:

https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdSfuya8/

@cookieman Nanny Fran didn’t sound like she went to Harvard either. I know when I say cawfee I’m giving away my NY connection and exaggerated it sounds funny to some people.

I don’t know any Italians who say sang-a-which, where is that? What city?

People who are higher up in social status tend to have less of an accent, articulate words more fully, and tend to stay closer to the standard English expected when writing. Actually, that’s true in most languages. They might use a dialect at home or when with a group of people who are all similar culture and background, but they switch it on and off. I’m generalizing, it’s not always true, but that’s my experience.

My husband switches from Spanish with his family to English if he is at work. I admit I kind of expect that regarding dialects when someone was raised in America. I don’t expect people to speak perfect English all of the time (whatever exactly perfect English is) or to not have any accent (everyone has an accent) but saying aks I really don’t understand if someone wants a promotion to VP level in a big corporation.

I used to say na-kin instead of napkin, but since I knew how to spell it, I said it correctly when having lunch with my boss. Now, I always say it correctly actually after all these years.

When I lived in the South executives at work rarely said y’all even if they used it outside of work. My husband’s company had to create a list of words and phrases not to use for people in customer service. Don’t say “fixin’” is one I remember. It was all Southern slang and dialect that they needed to delete from the employees’ vocabulary while they were talking to customers. They couldn’t figure out to do it on their own.

I’m from the NY metro area where everyone talks like Tony Soprano and I’ve never heard sang-a-which for sandwich.

To me, “aks” for ask just sounds awful, even though I hear it all the time, 99% of the time from African Americans. My grandfather was from the swamps of Louisiana and he never said “aks” so I don’t consider it a pronunciation based on income.

^^Tony Soprano. Lol. So true. When I was in England with my family on vacation as a teenager we were speaking to an Italian man and my dad asked him if he was from Brooklyn. The man replied, “no I’m from Italy.”

Do you know Black people in NY who are upper middle class or upper class who say aks when talking to you?

@JLeslie: No, I don’t.

@JLeslie: Pretty much every Italian-American kid I grew up with in Medford (just North of Boston) called it a sang-a-which. Some still do as adults.

Do they really say “aks” or “ax?”

I hear it as aks not ax. It’s not said the same as the tool, although I don’t know if they say the tool the same way? The word ax is rarely in a sentence where I live; not many people are splitting wood.

I think that’s part of what makes it worse, it sounds like they are reversing the letters, not just pronouncing it differently.

They both sound exactly the same so it doesn’t matter @kritiper.

Here’s an opinion and explanation https://youtu.be/l-VnitbeS6w

I don’t completely agree with her.

It’s like a toddler trying to say “ask” for the first time.

I found out that back in the olden days, “aks” was the correct spelling before “ask” came into being. But when I put the question to friends, they thought it would be spelled as “ax” or “axe.” An interesting tidbit.

Do you have a source for that @kritiper? I can’t find anything.

@cookieman Lol, they add the extra syllable in the middle. It’s like my exboyfriend’s mom used to say “es-strawberry” like strawberry doesn’t already have enough syllables. I was just with one of my reporters (here in Florida) who lives in Italy and when he spoke Spanish to his mom I told him he speaks Spanish with an Italian accent, he said he’s told that a lot, but it was more than accent it was the entire rhythm of how he spoke.

@kritiper I don’t think it matters. My link touches on the history too. English used to use the word thou and use the letter f instead of s in literature. So what? Does that somehow justify saying it incorrectly or spelling words incorrectly now? Too long ago. Are people who say aks/ax writing it that way? I don’t think so. We can argue dialect is correct, but it is not the common pronunciation. It just isn’t. People think it’s wrong to say aks sounds terrible. Even Oprah Winfrey tried to advise that English is your friend to her Black audience.

@Dutchess_III A buddy of mine found that on the internet so I can’t say anything about it. In my 2012 Webster’s and my three volume1944 The New Century dictionaries, there is nothing.

Well “ask”, on the other hand, has been around for hundreds of years, going back to Olde English.

First, let’s be clear that “aks” is not limited to African Americans. While it is part of African American Vernacular English, that is not the only context in which it can be heard. “Aks” can be found in some places in the American South (which isn’t surprising since AAVE is largely derived from, and has a lot of overlap with, other dialects of the rural South), as well as certain parts of New York City (especially Staten Island). It can also be found in the Caribbean and in South Africa (where it is common among people of Indian descent). So while it is both regional and cultural, it is also said by black people, white people, and even Asian people.

“Aks” is also a historically common pronunciation. Neither “ask” nor “aks” existed in Old English, but the word from which “ask” is derived did. Linguists have decided that the standard form of that word was “ascian” (pronounced “as-kee-an”). But the alternative form “acsian” (pronounced “ak-see-an”) actually appears more frequently than the standard form (most notably in Beowulf, which is arguably the most important piece of Old English literature we have). “Ascian” is only considered “standard” because we’re pretty sure it was derived from the proto-Germanic word “aiskon” (which is a reconstruction, not a word found in any surviving writings) and because we know it eventually became “ask.”

That said, it wasn’t exactly a straight line from “ascian” to “ask. Both “ask” and “aks”/“axe” appear in Middle English, and it is again “aks” or “axe” that is found in some the most important surviving works of that era (such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). The alternative form also appears (as “axe”) in the first complete Modern English translation of the Bible (the Coverdale Bible, published in 1535). In short, “aks” has been a part of the English language for a long time and appears in all three major forms of the language (Old English, Middle English, and Modern English).

So why does this happen? The answer is metathesis (“mə-TA-thə-səs”)—the transposition of two sounds (usually adjacent consonants) within a word. Metathesis is so common that you probably do it without even thinking about it (for example, if you’ve ever pronounced “comfortable” as “comf-ter-ble” instead of “com-for-ta-ble”). We naturally tend towards pronunciations that are easier. In practice, this means moving our mouths less, which in turn means not making our tongues or our jaws move back and forth more than necessary. Instead, we tend to prefer pronunciations that allow us to move less and more smoothly.

Words that require us to make sounds in the front of our mouth, then the back, then the front again (or other combinations that skip around) inevitably undergo change over time and are often preceded by dialects containing that change. Words that allow us to move smoothly from sounds made in the back of the mouth to sounds made in the front of the mouth or vice versa, on the other hand, are more likely to be stable over time (barring other sound changes). The standard pronunciation of “ask” requires us to transition from a starting position to a middle position to an ending position. By contrast, “aks” requires only a single transition from the starting position to the ending position. This makes “ask” a prime candidate for metathesis. This doesn’t mean that we’ll all be saying “aks” in a thousand years. But if we are, it won’t be that big of a surprise.

@CunningLinguist I wonder if people taught to read phonetically are less likely to say aks. I don’t know how they teach reading today, but I was in the years where it was almost all phonetic, and shortly after me they were doing more of the sighting a word thing. I don’t know what that’s called.

I would think it’s more difficult to spell if a lot of one’s dialect doesn’t match the spelling. I realize spelling is somewhat of a nightmare to begin with in English, but why make it even harder.

So, IF A=B and B=C that would mean possibly people who have trouble with literacy would have even more trouble in every way both reading to writing if their dialect is not corrected. In the US today every teacher will correct ax or aks to ask on a written essay.

I have no problems with dialects, but I have a problem with people not learning both their dialect and the expectations in the US for “standard” English, because it limits the individual themselves. I say the same thing about immigrants who never learn English. Just to be clear I have no prejudice about immigrants who never learn English, I think we should have multilingual documents, drivers license tests, voting ballots, etc., but I do think it’s good for a country to have a common language, and especially in the US I think English is very important since we have so much immigration from so many countries.

Saying aks is not a speech impediment that we might look past (maybe it is for a minority of people) it is more like a giveaway about the person and then all sorts of prejudices and stereotypes might ensue. Whether prejudices and stereotypes are fair is not the point, I’m just talking about the reality.