Why mocking "aks" is pretty racist, actually: clearing up misconceptions about language

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by Jaiden
Published: 2024-10-22 (last update: 2024-11-05)
15-30 minutes

This essay aims to examine some misguided assertions that I have seen quite often over the years. Some of these views are not only held by liberals but also by communists, and not only by people who know little about language and linguistics but also by people who have dipped their toes in it and think of themselves as knowing quite a bit.

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This essay aims to examine some misguided assertions that I have seen quite often over the years. Some of these views are not only held by liberals but also by communists, and not only by people who know little about language and linguistics but also by people who have dipped their toes in it and think of themselves as knowing quite a bit. As such, it is important to discuss these topics. I must add that, while I do study linguistics and the English language in university, I am not an expert. Always be critical of what you read. Anyways, let's start with the first, and most pressing assertion.

You can't say "aks"! It's ungrammatical!

/Aks/ instead of /ask/ is a non-standard variation of English speech and as such, people have very strong feelings about it. /Aks/ is a different pronunciation of the verb to ask, but it means the same thing. Aks is used in the New Afrikan dialect of English, especially in the south of the USA but also in other places where New Afrikans exist. Against popular belief, aks is not only used by black people in the south but also in some British dialects and by some non-black people in the southern US. However, people who deride aks as being ungrammatical, seem to be concerned mostly about how black people specifically use it and how that is wrong. In linguistics, assertions of "correct" or "grammatical" language usage are called linguistic prescriptivism. Prescriptivism is contrasted with linguistic descriptivism, which only seeks to describe how language is used and not to judge whether or not it is "correct" or to prescribe how to use language more "correctly".

Linguistic prescriptivism is primarily used to serve the ruling class of capitalist society. To see how this is the case, let me present to you some examples. Prescriptivism derides language usage specific to the working class as being incorrect. Take for example the insistence by prescriptivists that people should "pronounce their t's". To clarify, in England, there is a working class sociolect in which the /t/ in words like water is replaced with a glottal stop /ʔ/ (the sound you make when you say uh-oh for example). This is, just like /aks/, a non-standard variation of the word water, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect. The standard is always relative and it depends upon who upholds it.

In the UK, the standard is Received Pronunciation (RP), but when you look at certain groups of speakers, it becomes clear that very few of them actually strictly adhere to RP. This is the case with the wa'ah example. In certain social groups, replacing /t/ with /ʔ/ is the standard and even if prescriptivists say that speakers should all adhere to the standard variation of a given language, they fail to realize that this standard is always relative. It is evident that the targeting of this non-standard language variation is purely informed by classism and the derision of this non-standard, spoken mainly by English workers, only serves the ruling class by hindering worker solidarity. The same is true for aks, though now, it's not only a class, but also a race issue. The same arguments apply to the prescriptivist derision of the variation aks and we can see that it perpetuates the status quo by putting workers against each other on the basis of supposed racialized language usage.

I previously said that prescriptivism primarily serves the capitalist status quo. That's because prescribing how language should be used is not always a bad thing. Telling someone not to say slurs is an instance of positive prescriptivism. Telling someone that subtle is not spelled like suttel is also an instance of prescriptivism that is not only acceptable but also just correct. The big difference between reactionary and progressive prescriptivism is that the ladder is based upon the general consensus of native speakers. Any language needs rules to function, and those rules are agreed upon by the native speakers of the language through a process called conventionality. If prescriptivism doesn’t actively serve the status quo by perpetuating racism or dividing workers and is also in accordance with conventionality, I like to call it acceptable prescriptivism. If prescriptivism defies the status quo and is used to liberate oppressed peoples (like forbidding usage of slurs for example) it can be described as progressive prescriptivism. Note that most prescriptivism happening today is reactionary in nature, though. Language itself may not be a part of the superstructure but linguistic prescriptivism is, and like anything that's part of the superstructure, prescriptivism is used as a tool of maintaining the economic base.

I must add that by "working class sociolect", I am not referring to some theorized class character of language itself. As Stalin clarified, there is no such thing as class language. I agree. What I mean is that both /'water/ and also /'waʔer/ are different pronunciations of the same word in the English language; the bourgeoisie (who don't use /waʔer/) speak the same language as those workers who do use the non-standard and they can communicate perfectly well in their shared national language regardless of whether they pronounce a /t/ or a /ʔ/. Furthermore, not all workers in England use this variation, some use the RP standard or another variation. So we can see that, while not a symptom of class language, /waʔer/ is an example of a sociolect, a variation of a standard national language that arises from the fact that differing social groups are seperated to certain degrees and also from the want and/or need for social groups to have linguistic group signifiers. If someone says /waʔer/, we can safely assume that they are not part of the bourgeoisie, this is one of the connotations of this variation. Another example of connotations would be that, if someone uses the word slay, we can safely assume that they are relatively young. This is not language having some inherent class character, which it has not, it is simply that different groups of speakers tend to develop some variation in their language usage.

I feel like I need to clarify that making fun of wa'ah doesn’t automatically make you a class traitor or something like that. However, it might be interesting for anyone who does like to make fun of such variations to examine why they are doing so. Why do you find it funny? Who does you making fun of it benefit? And especially in the aks vs. ask example, could your derision be driven by deep seated racism? These are important questions to aks yourself if you want to fight against these systems of oppression as a whole. Language might be a small part of the entire racist capitalist structure, but it is a tool, and like all tools, it can be wielded with the intend to build up or with the intent to destroy.

Irish english is an accent of British English.

This stems from a general misconception as to what actually differentiates dialects from accents. The common conception is that native speakers of a non-standard language variation speak dialects and language learners speak with an accent. This is enough for everyday usage, but a more scientific definition is that dialects are language variations that differ in terms of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation from the standard variation and accents only differ from the standard in terms of pronunciation. This definition is more accurate because there do exist native speakers who only speak a different accent, only changing pronunciation, and not changing grammar nor vocabulary in any significant way.

Furthermore, there are nations with their own national language whose members have to learn and often only get to learn the language of their colonizer. Do some members of the same nation speaking their colonizer's language have a dialect and do members who speak their national language as their mother tongue and the colonizer's language non natively have an accent, even though the language variation of the colonizer's language that developed within their nation is the same between native speakers and non-native speakers? To return to the original thesis, Irish English is not an accent of RP, regardless of whether any Irish person speaks English or Irish as their mother tongue. Because Irish English has it's own morphosyntactic rules and differences in vocabulary and pronunciation, it is considered a dialect.

It is also important to think about what's commonly regarded as the standard variation of a language. For German for example, it is rather easy. High German or standard German is the standard variation. Austro-Bavarian, Thuringian, Badish and so on can all easily be classified as dialects. But English is harder because the commonly regarded standard has been shifting from RP to Statesian English. English is also a much more global language and acts as a kind of lingua franca for many parts of the world because of UK and US-imperialism.

We should just adopt the IPA as a universal script/orthography!

This is a sentiment that exists only in hobby-linguist spaces like r/linguistics or comparable places. But I have heard it once in a linguistics seminar. The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system of transcription that assigns each speech sound that occurs in any language on the globe a symbol, in order to make it easier for people to understand how a word in a foreign language is pronounced. The argument goes that it would be best for every language to use the IPA as its script so that nobody would ever wonder how anything is pronounced.

There's a couple of problems with this. First of all, the IPA is plain ugly. Why would you ever want to replace the graceful Arabic script with this abomination: [ˈdˤɑħ.ħæ] ضَحّى ('[he] sacrificed')

And the further away a language is from english the uglier it looks as transcribed by the IPA:

English: /ˈtæks.peɪər/ taxpayer

French: [lez‿aɲo] les agneaux

Navajo: [txópɑ́tʃɪ́ʒ̊tʃʰɪ́nɪ́] Tóbájízhchíní

Russian: [tɕɪˈtɨrʲɪ] четы́ре

Inuktitut: [pi.ɡi.aʁ.ˈniq] ᐱᒋᐊᕐᓂᖅ

Excuse my individualistic aesthetic preferences, though the last examples can make a more substantial point. The IPA was designed primarily by white Englishmen and it reflects upon it in a very eurocentric light. That's kind of problematic, some people might even say that it's racist (that's me, I am some people).

Isn't it enough that westerners force a eurocentric transscription system upon the nations of the world all while calling it international? Should westerners really get to force all nations of the world to use their eurocentric transcription system as their regular script?

My second point is one of pure practicability. If you wrote everything in the IPA, you would have to analyze every little speech sound you make in order for people to understand. What happens if you have a dialect or an accent? Do you transcribe it faithfully and risk that people with other dialects, accent or sociolects who do, however, speak your national language will not understand it? Or do you conform to the standard variation while transcribing and risk losing your local dialect? Also, like, adapting your IPA writing to the standard variation defeats the whole purpose of what it was trying to achieve in the first place, because you would no longer write as you speak, and other people would no longer have an understanding of how you speak through your IPA writing alone. Also, analyzing your own speech can only go so far. What if you have a lisp, a cleft lip or a stutter? Have fun consulting the IPA extension for disordered speech. Speakers would, even if this was imposed unilaterally, eventually just develop their own national differences between IPA writing because of the reasons I mentioned above. This would, after some time has passed, result in different writing systems again.

We should just get rid of the letters x and c in the English alphabet!

This is a very popular sentiment and I honestly do not understand why. The argument goes as follows: We can get rid of the letters x and c because they are redundant. X can be written as ks, as in takses or relaksing. C can be written as k, as in kat or konnekt, they say.

However, this entirely ignores digraphs. How would these people solve the problem of ch as in cheese, or ck as in lucky? Would they write them like tsheese and lukky? Also, sometimes x and c are pronounced different than /ks/ and /k/ respectively. What about cello? What about xylophone? What about center, Hoxha, x-ray, cupid? Would they like to spell cupid like qupid? It doesn’t feel thought through at all. Then again, it would be impossible to implement these changes. People would not change how they write this drastically.

You can spell fish like ghoti!

Supposedly: because the gh in tough is pronounced /f/, the o in women is pronounced /ɪ/ and the ti in the word nation is pronounced like sh, you can spell fish like this -> ghoti, and still follow all structural rules of the English language.

This is blatantly wrong. And I don't feel bad for pointing it out and ruining the fun because this meme is so stale at this point that there's no fun to be ruined. English has certain phonotactic rules. Phonotactics are concerned about which sounds are allowed where and how we need to write those sounds. The English language only allows gh to represent the sound /f/ in the coda (after the vowel) of a syllable, not in the onset (before the vowel). O representing the sound /ɪ/ is actually completely unique to the word women and even that is not true for all variation of English and ti can only be pronounced like sh if it is followed by an on: nation, salvation, condemnation. So, no, ghoti is not possible and would not be understood by any native English speaker. This argumentation is an instance of prescriptivism but it is not reactionary because it is based in conventionality and does not perpetuate oppression in any way.

Grammatical gender is stupid and useless!

This is very prevalent even outside of linguist or hobby-linguist circles. Especially learners of gendered languages show this sentiment. What do I mean by gendered language? A lot of languages arbitrarily classify nouns into different categories. Take for example the noun bridge. In English, the bridge has no inherent category other than noun. In German, however, it inhabits the feminine category: die Brücke. In Spanish, it is el puente, the masculine category. There is a lot of confusion about why Germans think that bridges are female, but this is not the case. These grammatical gender categories are just that - purely grammatical. Speakers of languages that have grammatical gender do not think about nouns in feminine or masculine frameworks as applied to humans. These gender categories are assigned arbitrarily. That means that it could have been der Brücke or la puente if history had turned out slightly differently. It is also important to note that not all languages that classify nouns do so in terms of gender. Tamil assigns humans and deities the rational category and other nouns the nonrational category, with the rational category having further subcategories.

However, the people who complain about noun class distinctions do not complain about the more comprehensible noun classes of most languages, rather, they complain about German, Spanish, French, and other languages with gender based noun classes specifically. It is true that learning the gender categories that are randomly assigned to each and every noun is a chore. Then, the question follows: why on earth would all these speakers choose to deal with all of that instead of just gradually getting rid of grammatical gender like English did during the Middle English period.

Language is in constant change through the dialectical process. It evolves continuously to adjust to changing material conditions, in terms of new vocabulary but also morphosyntax, phonetics, pragmatics and so on. As marxist-leninists, we also know that there needs to be some material reason as to why speakers of gendered languages keep this feature that seems so random. And yes, grammatical gender is actually quite useful in a very simple way. Speakers just have it easier to understand what others are talking about in noisy environments. Take for example a busy train station. If I didn’t quite make out what english noun you just said, I'd have to ask you. But in german, if I did understand the article you used - der, die or das - my chances of understanding the noun, with this added context, is much higher. This applies to writing aswell. Also, speakers of languages with grammatical gender show increases in the speed of spoken word recognition when the article of a familiar noun is marked with the correct grammatical gender. To conclude, we can say that the evidence suggests that grammatical gender is in fact not stupid nor useless and actually has some reasons that it exists.

It is very important to consider a more meta level reading of this issue. And it is, once more, about linguistic prescriptivism. Saying that languages with grammatical gender are stupid and should get rid of it is obviously reactionary and prescriptivist, but saying that grammatical gender is actually awesome and implying that speakers of other languages would be better off if they adopted it is prescriptivist aswell. We mustn't make this mistake. The correct marxist-leninist line is that some languages have this feature due to a number of material reasons and other languages do not have this feature due to other material reasons. They function well enough with or without it. Grammatical gender as a whole should neither be opposed nor appraised but only understood through a historical materialist framework. One is not better or worse than the other. It is important, as I stated before, for marxist-leninists to oppose reactionary prescriptivism under all circumstances. The prescriptivist derision of grammatical gender, too, only serves to divide the working class. A lot of European, African, Indigenous American, Indian, Polynesian languages and more share this feature called grammatical gender and saying that it is inherently bad is a perfect counterexample of how internationalists should act.

A comrade has pointed out that there is yet another perspective to consider, and it has to do with trans and non-binary people and their place in languages with grammatical gender. In English, terms for jobs, like teacher, do not specify upon the gender of the referent. In German however, (in Spanish and French it is the same but I am most familiar with German) there is der Lehrer (masculine) and die Lehrerin (feminine). Note that this is not, strictly speaking, an instance of grammatical gender in the form of noun classes, because the masculine/feminine noun classes for Brücke or puente are assigned arbitrarily, whereas terms for jobs and similar things are (hopefully) assinged according to the referent's gender. This is, in contrast to grammatical gender, called natural gender. Natural and grammatical gender do not need to match up because the grammatical gender is assigned with no regard to the natural gender. Take for example the German word das Mädchen (the girl in English), even though girls are female, the noun class of girl in German is in fact neuter due to obscure grammatical reasons that have nothing to do with the natural gender of girl.

The question still stands, though. In English, teacher is non-gendered and non-binary people can use the third person pronoun they, but in German, and other gendered languages, this is harder. German has a third person plural pronoun that could be made into a singular one, but the pronoun in question, sie, is literally the same as the feminine third person pronoun, which makes it useless. Non-binary Germans have opted for dey/deren/denen, (dey being a germanization of they and deren/denen being the dative and accusative cases respectively) which works fine. The hard part is job descriptions. There is no non-binary option for teacher, or baker, or worker in any gendered languages that I know of. This is a massive problem with no quick solution. There is a huge culture war around the "genderstar" * in Germany for example. Basically, you don’t use Genossen (comrades) because it is only male, and you don’t use Genossinnen und Genossen because, even though you include female comrades, you exclude non-binary comrades and also it is really long and unwieldy. Instead, the variation Genoss*innen has become very popular to include all genders. There are other workarounds, though. Instead of Lehrer (male) I like to say Lehrperson/Lehrkraft (teaching person in English). This gender neutral language does not exclude non-binary people and can be a bit more elegant than the genderstar.

Speakers of German, French, Spanish and so on are adapting more and more in order not to exclude non-binary people through language usage. Even though gendered terms like these hurt trans and non-binary people because there's a lot more risk of misgendering, which is a way for transphobes to devalue and extinguish the humanity of trans people, there is also a flip side to this. In a society in which the need for trans people to pass has gone for good and gender liberation has been fought for and achieved (see Anna's essay on Gender Liberation), gendered terms like this could also be a more discreet way of communicating to people who don't know you what your gender is. Also, in that future society, it could be a way of knowing who the transphobes are, when they refuse to address you with the correctly gendered version of baker for example. Note that, in my opinion, this doesn’t apply to today, because transphobia is the default. If trans people have liberated themselves and aren’t oppressed anymore, transphobia becomes an outlier, and thus ceases to be institutionally dangerous. Only then is my argument even somewhat valid.

In conclusion, language will always adapt to changing material conditions. Trans and non-binary people have fought and are still fighting for their liberation and language must be a part of that. Speakers of languages like German or French that do not have a way to address non-binary people are currently in the process of changing that fact. This is achieved through using existing pronouns in new ways, implementing neopronouns, changing grammatical rules and semantic drift (drift might be a slightly inaccurate word because it implies that it happens automatically instead of actual people and their actions being the forces behind this change, also, by semantic drift, I am referring to gendered words that change to become gender neutral, like the word poet, which used to be the masculine counterpart to the feminine poetess, but became gender neutral as poetess fell out of use).

Language is a material phenomenon and it affects our lives materially. Some languages have sharper contradictions than others and thus they change more drastically to adapt to new material conditions. Trans people demanding liberation is a material thing aswell and this, of course, greatly affects language. German will change to include non-binary people and other languages will do the same. Grammatical gender in the form of arbitrary noun class distinctions is currently not inherently oppressive towards trans and non-binary people, but, like I said before, language and its features are a tool that can be used to oppress or to liberate, and sadly, the grammatical gender vs. natural gender dynamic and the lack of words to address non-binary people right now is used as a tool for oppression against non-binary and trans people.

Thank you guys, gals and non-binary pals for reading! I hope you liked my first essay on a topic that is very important to me. I'd love to get criticism on this, and/or some suggestions on other misconceptions that I should examine further.