Why do African Americans pronounce the work "ask" as "axe"?

[ethanallen]

Is there something anatomically in the mouthes of African Americans the prevent them from pronounce "ask" correctly. I wish I could ask some of them to pronounce "task", "flask", "mask", "gasket", "ski" , "skit", "skim". I wonder how those words would be pronounced. Maybe someone on GAG is a speech therapist and can answer this.

Updates

+1 y

Should read "pronounce the word "ask"

[WhiteSteve]

I was watching a few videos about accents done by a dialect coach, and he had a few ladies who I assume are in linguistics. The dialect coach was a white guy, he did the white accents. Then they had a black, Latina, and Native American woman to give examples of those respective accents.

So, firstly, I think there was a region in the UK where white people there say it like “axe”, so it’s not a genetic trait attributed to race. I can’t recall if it was from these videos or one more specific to the UK, but I did hear that.

But my main takeaway from the videos was that distinctive accents develop through a combination of settler population origins (he gave an example of West vs East Texas accents, different parts had different groups migrate there), isolation, and time. As another example, he was likening something about certain New Orleans accents that shared some common linguistic characteristics with New York, and the reason was that those two areas were closely tied as a trade route at one time. And regarding time, they noted that, with only a few exceptions, the Rocky Mountain and West Coast states don’t vary in accents as much, the reason being that there just hadn’t been enough time yet, since that’s a “younger” part of America, whereas if you went to the East Coast, accents vary almost from state to state.

To your original question, slavery and then segregation is a big reason for the various African-American dialects and accents, as they were brought together from different countries in Africa with different languages, and they needed to be able to communicate with each other, and understand and communicate with white slave owners, yet they weren’t educated in white schools. So, there was isolation and there was time for this all to develop. For the record, not all black folks say “axe” for “ask”, but those who do, that’s likely part of the reason.

Very interesting series. I’ll just post the first video, but there are two other parts that you can easily find once you watch this one, if you or anyone else cares to. I believe they do other parts of the world as well in other videos, too.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/H1KP4ztKK0A

[U4ea0]

Stop blaming slavery. You will notice no other racial group thoroughly debases every language they speak.

[ethanallen]

Thank you for a very intelligent and helpful answer. I am going to study the video and look at this further. I never heard about the group of whites in UK who use the pronunciation 'axe" for 'ask.' Great answer WhiteSteve.

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0 You ever notice how white Americans, Canadians, Australians DON’T have proper English accents or speak the “King’s/Queen’s English?” I wonder why that is….🤔 Oh, wait, literally the entire English-speaking world outside of England (and even IN England, in certain places) speak a “debased” form of original English. The only difference is the white ones doing it are fine to you because you clearly have a palpable disdain for black people, and you don’t like hearing about the abomination that was slavery, it’s apparently triggering for you. It’s ok, man, you didn’t do it, no one is saying it’s your fault. And we’re talking about something trivial here, the way words are spoken, so maybe take off the tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches, Professor.

[WhiteSteve]

No worries, man, glad it was helpful. I’m very intrigued by accents, so it was a very informative and interesting video series for me👍

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0

Is this debased English to you, too?

https://youtu.be/R_C4PDSfQJA

[ethanallen]

Whitesteve, I watched the linguistics video. Only 20 minutes but fantastic. No mention of axe ask but here is an interesting article from the LA Times by a linguist about the very topic. A short but very interesting read. I honestly used to think that black people saying axe for ask were stupid but the author explains the origins or axe and why it remains. It isn't about intelligence but about identity.

www.latimes.com/.../...eech-ax-20140119-story.html

[U4ea0]

Same origin as "waddymelons".

[WhiteSteve]

Yeah, I thought it was really good. There’s a part 2 & 3 as well, that continues the tour of the accents of the continent. If I can find the one about “axe” in England again, I’ll post it here. Glad this was helpful and educational for you👍

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0 Who says “waddymelons?” Never heard that in my life from anyone, anywhere. And does it really negatively affect your life if someone said it that way? As long as you both understand that the object being referred to is a watermelon, then the language has sufficiently done its job. I don’t really see any reason to discriminate against anyone for the very light offense of pronouncing words differently than you do, if that’s even an offense in the first place.

[U4ea0]

I'll point out that I'm a white South African and as such am going to be overly harsh. If you had my experiences, you would as well. That being said, I was taught "International English" as is spoken in most other places. It took me very little time to switch to the American version. The biggest difference is mainly cultural. I wrote a short paper about this when I was in college.

Waddymelons is encountered in the American South and Midwest.

But, you gentlemen don't really understand the full scope of what I'm talking about. If a black man approached you and said, "nigga, fuck with me on a square", would you have a clue what he meant? No, you would not. You understood each word as far as proper English usage is concerned. It Just makes no sense. What he actually meant was "Hey man, can I have a cigarette?" This is what you encounter in the South.

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0 yeah, man, squares are cigarettes in some places. I would know exactly what that guy meant. Now we’re getting more into using slang though. I guess I missed “waddymelon” but I still can understand it.

Everything I know about South Africa, the black folks have things pretty bad, even post-Apartheid. If they aren’t super friendly to white people there from the jump, I’d have to say I probably understand. I don’t mean to discount your experiences, I don’t know the nature of them, but you can be mistreated on an individual level by anyone, I get all that. But you’ll have to forgive me if I have some preconceived notions about the way black folks are treated by white folks in South Africa.

[U4ea0]

The way they were treated reflected the way they behaved. During apartheid, we had a murder rate of about 2 per 100,000. Today, you have a murder rate of over 300 per 100,000. The worst American ghettos "only" have about 40 per 100,000. I'm only 28, so was not alive during that time. But, it is clear that things have gone and continue to go in the wrong direction. Perhaps people need to stop being sentimental in regards to assessing the quality of human life.

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0 Well, without getting into a whole thing, I think psychological damage has a lot to do with poor behavior, for anyone. The black folks in America who engage in things like gang activity, they don’t live in the suburbs, they aren’t college guys, they’re people from the most destitute neighborhoods and situations this country has to offer. I’m of the mind that it’s lazy thinking to just broadly condemn criminal behavior and aim to lock them up with no sympathy. Instead, we should be analyzing the roots of these problems and attacking the sources of them. I come from a similar area to that, but my family was living below its means, we weren’t desperate, my father was just frugal and focused on investing money rather than spending it on a home elsewhere. But as a result, I’ve seen and experienced both the inner city and suburban lifestyles. I can tell you first and for most that education is WILDLY different in terms of quality and the overall give-a-shit levels of the faculty. My city school teachers seemed like they were just paid to show up and leave. The suburbs were very different, we were fostered there. Show me a criminal, and I’ll show you a guy who was failed and quit on A LOT over the course of their childhood. Never underestimate the impact that psychological trauma has on a person and how much that steers their life. So to me, it can never be an issue of “personal responsibility” until the playing field has been leveled, not by quotas, but by a universal common tone of compassion, from womb to tomb. People just need to be better to one another, simple as that. “Hurt people hurt people”, as they say.

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0 *first and foremost

[U4ea0]

@WhiteSteve I'll give you props for not having a knee-jerk reaction to Mt messages...

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0 haha, cheers, man. We’re all going to have our own opinions, but keeping a cool head while discussing them is the only way to even have a shot at understanding one another. That seems to be a lost art these days, especially on the internet😂

[U4ea0]

Oh yeah, I've been banned from most social media.

[U4ea0]

Here is my contribution to accents. Keep in mind my accent is closer to yours than to Americans. Maybe mix between British and Dutch...

Many people throughout the world are convinced that a British accent is far more distinguished, cultivated and definitive than what passes for American speech. This of course also makes it more "correct," and it goes without saying that the British pronunciation of any given word must be preferable to Yankee mumbling. As we will soon see, this is far from being the case.

Many of these same people also assume that they can achieve a proper British accent simply by substituting broad English A's for all those frightful American "a-as-in-fast" sounds. Since this assumption is widespread among many students of English, the following example may be useful as a test of how well it works. Try reading this passage aloud with what you believe to be a correct English accent, and then check your way of saying it against the "correct," "received" pronunciation. Unless I am mistaken, even quite a few Britons will ignominiously fail at least part of this test, which may also provide a measure of the difficulties involved. Here's the passage:

"The fancy falcon cast a dastardly pass after an unfastened ass with asthma. By Bacchus, what a disastrous aftermath! Mere mastery of this scanty example cannot mask your transatlantic, antipodean, or lower class antecedents."

It is for you to decide, after perusing the "correct" how "correct" you want your own English to be. In fact, as few as twenty percent of Britons are likely to pronounce this passage close to "correctly" (and perhaps only ten percent will get it totally "right"). These all too probable results raise considerable questions as to whether the British should go on teaching this as correct pronunciation and whether the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary should continue marking vowels as they now do.

Something to think about...

[WhiteSteve]

@U4ea0 Well, firstly, we might be misunderstanding each other here…. I’m not British, I’m American. I have a HEAVY Boston accent, so most people assume I’m a fucking idiot when I speak😂 My father is 90 years old and has a Boston Brahmin accent, although we aren’t a Brahmin family (elite, upper class descendants of the earliest English colonists). So I have say the “a-as-in-fast”, but my dad uses a more broad A in many words, like in the Received Pronunciation of British English. Just today I was helping him buy socks online, and he asked the socks pull up on the “cahlf.” He says “bahthroom”, “hahlf an hour”, etc, which I don’t. It’s kind of hard for me to think of American accents from a foreigner’s perspective, I actually wish I could because I’m curious how we sound to others. Not very good, apparently😂

Had a great time reading that passage to myself in my idea of RP English, lmao. Thanks to the Ted Lasso character Jamie Tartt, I got sent down a rabbit hole of regional English accents (he’s faking his Mancunian [Manchester, UK] accent, but regardless, it was noticeably different from, say, the owner of the team, who has the British accent I’m most used to hearing, I think it’s considered RP).

[WhiteSteve]

I also had a very difficult time understanding Game Of Thrones when I first began watching. The actors were mostly Brits but they seemed to speak in their native accents, which could’ve been from anywhere, and it took me a full season of the show to adjust to it. What I found out were the ones that gave me the most trouble were the Northern UK accents, Yorkshire, Scottish, etc. Southern UK accents I’m much more accustomed to, London, Cockney, and to a lesser extent, Essex. But I’m now fascinated by all of them and want to know everything about them, haha. Blows my mind that such a relatively small country has so many distinctly different accents and dialects. ELEVEN U. S. states are bigger than the UK, and that’s including Northern Ireland, which I haven’t even delved into yet since it’s on the neighboring island. If you just kept it to England, Scotland, and Wales, there may be a few more states that are bigger. Texas is one of those states, and to my knowledge, there’s really just a distinction between East and West Texas, and it doesn’t even seem drastically different. But cities 2-4 hours away from each other in the UK can be wildly different. Fascinating.

I gotta figure out how to do you guys’ accent. I rarely hear it, I’ve actually only met one South African in my life. She taught me some dance, I think it was called the Gumboot? Something like that, haha. Anyway, all I know is her and the immigration agent from Lethal Weapon 2, lmao. My attempt would probably be as bad as Joe Pesci’s was😂
https://youtu.be/9v4CFjrjBxc

[ethanallen]

@U4ea0 You should look into John McWhorter's views on blacks in America. He is a Professor of Linguistics and he is black. You'd be surprised that he agrees with you but what is interesting is the reason why.

[U4ea0]

@ethanallen Will do, sounds good.

[andreasderjuengere]

''Americans'' in general are struggling with the English language, and original spelling specifically.

Simplifying a once rich cultural heritage is part of the 'American Dream' - even the dumbest can participate.

This is sarcasm of course. What I actually mean is:

If you're sitting in shit up to your chin - then you better avoid making waves :D

[U4ea0]

Actually this isn't even true. You obviously know nothing of linguistics or the history of the English language. Using a "z" in place of a "s" in some words is closer to English tradition than the reverse. So is using just "o" instead of "ou".

[andreasderjuengere]

@U4ea0 One of my majors in high school exams was ''English'' - would I have followed ''autocorrect'' or Microsoft's ''spell checking'' (as per today) ... I'd have failed bitterly and spectacularly :D
Your guys' ''American'' language is just a mutation.
Like cancer :D
But at least you still understand my words, heh heh.

[Anonymous]

It’s a learned dialect. Just like in certain areas of the country people say “warsh” instead of “wash” or how some places have a folksy style of speech that chops the g off the end of words (goin’ instead of going). It’s not that people can’t pronounce words correctly. It’s that they tend to adopt the style of speech around them and common mispronunciations are sometimes part of that.

[U4ea0]

It's called a pidgin which in linguistics is a debased version of a language. That is what ebonics is. Blacks do it to every language they are exposed to.

[MangoBob]

That’s ebonics, and its just a way to be different, like wearing a 1970’s New York pimp outfit.

[ethanallen]

When I posted this question, I thought this was a "black thing." It turns out that it is not. White people in UK and Europe have been saying "ax" or "axe" for "ask" since 1200 AD. The Coverdale Bible has "axe and you shall receive." The English Poet Chaucer used axe extensively for ask.
Looking through the Columbia Online Concordance to Chaucer’s Works, I see the word axe as a verb is quite frequent. Limiting ourselves to just The Canterbury Tales and The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer includes 11 appearances as “axed” and 4 times as a participle “axen”, 1 time as “axest” in the second person, and 9 times as “axeth” in the third person.

[OddBeMe]

Yeah! And the yellows can't say L?

[ethanallen]

You will need to give me an example of this. I don't know what you are saying.

[_Troian_]

Afro-Americans have their own slang bruh

[anylolone]

Semantic shift.

[RealDaveThomas]

Why not?