Redditors argue about the mispronunciation "aks"

From the Middle-English word asken, which itself was derived from the Old English ascian and acsian and acs, which was common in literature around the time of Chaucer (indeed it's used in the original Canterbury Tales).

There's a linguistic phenomenon called "metathesis" that develops from the fact that written languages follow spoken ones, and changes in spoken language are sometimes not reflected very accurately or immediately in written ones. Look at words like "iron" or "Wednesday", which have the letters "out of order" compared to how they are spoken.

So with the word in question...

Around the time America was starting to coalesce into a nation, a linguistic shift happened back in the UK where "acs" became "ask". Since America is separated by a whole butt ocean and class stratification meant that the majority of people generally held onto older pronunciations rather than the cutting edge University ones....well, point is, Americans said "aks" a LONG time after the British switched on over to "ask".

And in America, class stratification takes on a new look with the effects of slavery/oppression. Black people are locked out of most education beyond what's necessary to communicate. This, coupled with the fact that they, as a race, share a status of oppression, results in unique cultures developing among black people in Young America.

Language is a HUGE part of culture, and dialects that were unique among black Americans really take hold during this period.

Some artifacts of older English dialects that had no longer been considered "standard" by educated white Americans hung around black American dialects, particularly because...again...they were locked out of education systems and basically just learned primary language from one another rather than learning any sort of formal grammar rules.

Even as the Civil War wraps up and slaves are emancipated, the systems of oppression and segregation keep black Americans in tight-knit cultural and geographic boundaries, further isolating them from changes to what's considered "correct" in General American English dialects.

While the system that deliberately locks them out of educational access and such, the cultural identity at this point is very, very strong. It's not going anywhere, and this helps solidify what we now refer to African American Vernacular Dialect.

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of linguistic prejudices out there and this idea that primary schools instill in us that there is one "correct" way to speak English and deviations from it are to be scorned isn't really helping us understand the mechanisms behind why people speak the way they do.

Holy shit I dont normally say shit like this but this person srsly needs to kill themselves.

That's an incredible post. Thanks for taking the time to educate me, axe instead of ask always really annoyed me up until now as I thought people were willfully missaying the word to be cool. Turns out it's my own ignorance that's the issue here. Appreciate the insight

The person who made this response as well