Why do many African-Americans pronounce the verb "ask' as "ax"?

Question

Why do many African-Americans pronounce the verb "ask' as "ax"?

Answer 1

Its their culture, Unfortunately in this country the majority of black culture encourages poor verbal skills.

Listen to any black hip hop artist if you don't believe me.

Answer 2

slang...it's not the end of the world..

Answer 3

My opinion... laziness, because you have to put more effort when you say ask vs ax

Answer 4

Fake N & Dano, do you have on your Klansman hoods because you two sound like such racists! As someone mentioned, it is DIALECT. Has nothing to do with laziness. It's not fair to just LUMP ALL black people in the same category. That's like me saying "Why do all white people get tans?" All white people don't get tans, some do, but not ALL. And Fake N, you really sound like a true bigot stating that we 'encourage' poor language???? GTFOH! Please, diversify your life and meet more black people because we ARE NOT all the same. We are 3-dimensional, not 1-dimensional. Please stop the madness...

Answer 5

Well, I'm not black and I grew up using "ax" and not "ask".

Perhaps, that's because I'm from New Orleans.

Tons of white educated people use "ax", for us it's just a nawlins thing not really a black thing.

We ax people who ask this type of question... lol

Answer 6

prolly cuz one person started to say it and then theyre friends starting to say it and now a lot of people are sayin ax instead of ask  

Answer 7

wtf stupid *** question

Dano wtf yu mean we lazy bump this sh*t why white girls say like after every d**n word like d**n

Answer 8

It would be nice if we stopped trying to be 'different' so we could communicate better.

Answer 9

So do many "European-Americans." The sk combination is rather hard to pronounce, especially if the people one grows up around don't say it.  However, the same people usually don't have any trouble with the combination when it's followed by another syllable.  I've never heard anyone say "baxet."  As a matter of fact, in Old English the verb actually was "acsian."  No idea why or how it changed!

Answer 10

Or shrimp as scrimp, or straw as scraw?

Answer 11

The same reason so many European Americans pronounce for as fer. Bad English.

Answer 12

It's just dialect.  Not laziness, poor diction, or stupidity.

It's the same when Southerners say "poke" instead of "bag", or Jewish people say "oi" in exclamation rather than "oh"