Start carrying an axe. That should sort it.
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Ax instead of ask has only been in use for a thousand years. Probably time to get over it.
I though that was a New York thing- I remember Ed Koch using it a lot.
This has been a common pronunciation in African-American English for like forever.
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It’s been one of the pronunciations for 1000 years, way before there was such a thing as african-americans.
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I obviously live a sheltered existence
Or am particularly dense as this only recently came to my attention as two co workers say it that way
One is Afro mericano and the other is Mexicano
“Axe” sounds very ghetto-gangsta. Is “ask” that difficult to pronounce?
How about “soften”?
Soff-ten
I say “soffen”. The “t” is silent.
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Dead to me 
No harder than water instead of ‘wah-tah’ like our boston friends (or new yawkers, depending on exactly how you say wah-tah) say or oil instead of ‘all’ like texans say. Or aw-ften vs often. But, you know, some pronunciations get denigrated as ghetto. Weird, huh?
English has no equivalent to the Académie Française, so you can’t really declare one positively correct way. So embrace the differences . ;D
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Do non-African Americans pronounce it that way in your neck of the woods?
Wawdah
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Some. More when I was in New York and Los Angeles.
Interesting. I grew up in the Bay Area and I heard this pronunciation exclusively from African Americans.
The word Ebonics was originally coined in 1973 by African American social psychologist Robert Williams.
Ebonics
Now, the more socially “awoke” term which needs to be used in order to avoid offending.
African-American Vernacular
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Never did like that term. It reminds me of Dianetics or something.
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