It’s not slang, and it’s not a mistake
My most vivid memory from 8th grade Pre-Algebra has nothing to do with solving for X.
Sitting in the front of the middle row, I watched dust dance between the overhead projector’s lamp and transparency while its fan blew uncomfortably warm air in my face. The teacher was in the middle of explaining an equation when another voice became audible behind me to the left.
The teacher grew quiet as my classmate, a Black girl, finished what she was saying and then apologized, saying that her friend “aksed” her a question. Upon hearing this, the teacher, a white woman, exclaimed “She axed you?! Oh my god, are you OK?!” to laughter from the rest of the class, myself included.
I’m not proud of that.
I grew up around double-negatives (“I ain’t no punk!”), dropped gs (“Where you goin’?”) and other staples of what may be called Black English, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Ebonics. Indeed, most memorable lexical innovations in American English both then and now come from this dialect.
However, this same dialect comes in for an unfair share of abuse.
As recently as 2015, I had to contend with a dinner guest who insisted that it was the proposed inclusion of Ebonics into a California school curriculum that heralded the death of public education in America.
Back in high school, a Black substitute teacher, eccentric in both manner and dress, extemporaneously shared her thoughts on the matter, saying that she referred to the dialect as “bonics” because you didn’t have to be Ebony (Black) to use it. To be fair, she, like many in the African American community, was able to speak it in addition to “standard” American English, which she demanded be used in the classroom.
Today, plenty of English teachers online also dabble in AAVE, mistakenly teaching words and phrases including “Yo!” “It’s lit!” “Slay” “Tea” “On fleek (the original, for posterity’s sake)” and “Stay woke,” etc. as slang, which, according to linguists, they most certainly are not:
Ebonics is not synonymous with slang, the informal and usually short-lived word-usage most characteristic of teenagers and young adults.
To return to that musty portable outside of the middle school, what the Pre-Algebra teacher was missing was historical knowledge, to say nothing of cultural sensitivity.
Linguist John McWhorter explains how aks/ax evolved and has survived as a part of AAVE:
In Old English, the word for “ask” swung randomly between ascian and acsian, and nobody batted an eye.
All we know is that the people whose English was designated the standard happened to be among those who said “ask” instead of “aks” — and the rest is history.
There are other examples in his article, including how “fish” and “mash” became what they’ve become. However, what distinguishes “aks” from “ask” is that the now-non-standard variant has persisted in a very visible form. This quirk of history leads to some unfortunate tendencies:
Yet nothing can stop people from hearing “ax” as illiterate, which makes the word a small tragedy in its way. When a black speaker gets the most comfortable, the most articulate, the most herself — that is exactly when she is likely to slide in an “ax” for “ask.”
Many students in Russia may well react to this piece by saying that while this is all well and good as an academic or sociological bit of trivia, they want to speak “proper” English and not to sound “uneducated.” This bizarre protest against engaging with English as it is actually used among different peoples serves to reinforce classism and racism in ways that are difficult to deal with in the EFL classroom. It seems that many learners who are eager to join the English-speaking world want to do so on terms that cohere nicely with white supremacy and cultural hierarchy.
AAVE’s legitimacy as a natural language/dialect is without question among experts. However, it’s clear that the broader public both in the Anglosphere and outside of it face a regrettably steep learning curve when faced with these facts.
