Afro-Amerikaner och "Aks"

The way which some people say "ask" but mix up the sk - ks (just as many anglo-Americans say asterix instead of asterisk). Ax is very old however. The verb to ask comes from an Old English word which was written either as ascian or as acsian. Ax remained an accepted form of ask until the 16th century.

Linguists have traced the grammar and syntax patterns of black English to West African and Niger-Congo languages. Distinctive elements of black speech include the use of "to be" in place of "is" and "are" ("He be home today.") or its omission altogether ("He not coming."). The "s" is commonly omitted from third-person singular verbs ("He play football every day.") and may be dropped from other words as well ("Sometime he be too busy."). It can also be added to words where it would not appear in standard English ("That candy mines."). A final "th" in a word is often replaced by an "f' sound ("I going wif you."). Other features include the double subject ("My sister she went to the store.") and the pronunciation of "ask" as "ax."

Mary Berger, an experienced speech pathologist at Columbia College in Chicago, states that "the word 'Ax' instead of the word "ask" didn't start with southerners or blacks but came from the King's English. British slave-traders who used the old English 'Axian' and 'Axode' had a strong influence on the African contact language." The African slaves who were brought over to this country continued to use pidgin so that they could communicate with the American natives. Over the years the English Creole began to resemble more and more closely the language of the whites, because of the negative attitudes most whites had toward the African languages.