Learn English – How to pronounce “Anti” in American english

One of the earliest instances of the verb ask occurs in Old English as acsian. As the etymological note in the Oxford English Dictionary explains, acsian and axian survived down to nearly 1600 as the regular literary form, but was supplanted in Standard English by ask, originally the northern form.

As you have observed, a(h)ks is still heard in regional dialects. There is no doubt, however, that the standard form is ask, both in writing and in speech, and it is that form that foreign learners of English should use.

I'm from the Southeastern US. That omitting the final "t" sound is in a good many words. But when we do it, we usually pronounce the last sound a little differently than usual. I mean, it's basically the same sound, but we time it differently and such.

For example, even though we don't pronounce the "t" in "aren't", we still say "aren't" differently than we would "aren'". Same thing between "different" and "differen", or "mitigate" and "mitigae".

It's real difficult to describe the difference on paper. It's kind of like we don't say the last sound quite as long, or that we stop making the last sound very suddenly. Except that might not be 100% true, and we really slightly alter the sound into something more like a gutteral whisper, and we use something like a different, harsher tone. In this way, relatively soft sounds like "ay" and "n" are kind of hardened and are made to sound more like "ayt" or "nt". We fake the "t" sound essentially. Again it's something really hard to describe, but hopefully this helps.