don’t aks me.
/OT
Is it just me or is the term African
American English very cumbersome, and somewhat schizophrenic? 
/OT OFF
From Merriam-Webster online:
Fascinating theory.
Datapoint: I hear “aks” also from black Afro-Caribbean people too. Not sure if that’s endemic or relatively recent cross-pollination from US ebonics.
As a non-native speaker who has never heard this usage before, I find this thread quite fascinating. Just allow me one question: If you use the “aks” pronunciation (which, according to what has be said by others, is acceptable), what do you say if you used in the third person singular? “He akses”?
In the third person singular, in that dialect, you’d just say “aks”.
I believe it’s the same in the past tense too. “Yesterday I aks him.”
I would like to have aks(ed ?) him doesn’t quite seem right though 
I’ve heard the past tense with a “ed” before, like:
“So I axed him what was wrong, and he said he got fired…”
“ZEE-bruh”
How did people say it 150 years ago?
You mean he got axed.
“striped horse”
That’s what the Hungarian’s called it. It’s tricky because the “z” sound is silent in “striped” and the “b” sound is hardly noticable in “horse.”
Cue-pon
Chube (tube)
Chuesday
Scottish 101.
Or Zeh-brah in Britain.
Very few words are pronounced phonetically, ‘as they are spelled’. The letters ‘cu’ could refer to several different sounds actually, not just ‘koo’. Take the word abacus for example, you pronounce it ‘kuh’.
What about the word cube? Do you say koob? There’s no Q. Fact is, spelling only has a cursory relevance to how we pronounce things.
Here’s another relevant reference:
So the variation between /ask/ and /aks/ in different dialects of English both in the U.S. and in the U.K. has been around for a long time. I can’t quickly find any reference, but the variation between /ku/ and /kyu/ has also been around for a long time. To return to the OP then, in general it’s a bad idea to assume that because something is pronounced in a certain way in your dialect and another way in someone else’s dialect, the way you pronounce it is obviously standard and the way someone else pronounces it is their own bizarre choice. The same is true in grammar and vocabulary. Unless you’re a scholar of the history of English, you don’t know accurately what items of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, etc. of English are of long standing and which are recent innovations. In fact, it often happens that people don’t even accurately know the way they speak themselves. They will insist that they don’t use some particular item of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, etc. and then a few minutes later in conversation will use that item themselves.
The problem is when the so-called dialects overlap in a region. We figuratively beat “aks” and “liberry” out of children’s pronuciations around here. I would only accept “aks” from a person who was raised with that pronuciation if they spelled it “a-k-s”. The word spelled a-s-k has only only one pronuciation.
No, it really doesn’t!
Take the vowel at the beginning. Is it æ, or ɑː? Both are equally valid.
Yes, yes, I am well aware that there is no letter Q in the spelling of the word “coupon”; I was referring to the sound.
I have heard lots of people pronounce it both ways (“koo-pon” and “kyoo-pon”), but the “kyoo-pon” pronunciation has always struck me as strange: I wonder where it came from, since there’s nothing in the word’s spelling that would give rise to a “kyoo” sound. Some people here have tried to argue that it’s analogous to words with a “cu,” like “cube” or “curious” or “cucumber,” but that doesn’t really explain it because “coupon” is spelled with a “cou,” not a “cu,” and I don’t know of any other “cou” words that people pronounce with a “kyoo” sound. (Although now that I’ve said so, someone will probably come along to point one out.)
How do you pronounce “knee”? Is it kuh-nee or nee?
“Wednesday”? Is it Woden’s-day or wenzday?
“February”? febyouary?
It’s not a negative decay. It’s just evolution.
“Wednesday” → wenzday
…same type of transformation as…
“ask” → ax
Give it 150 years and probably everybody will pronounce it as ax. It requires less effort to pronounce. The human race is lazy. Pronouncing “ask” like ass-kuh is almost blurting out 2 separate syllables. That’s too much work.
Hmmm…
Well, I say WeDnesday, and FebRuary, and aSk, and it doesn’t seem to require any extra effort on my behalf. How is the pronunciation of a three letter word any easier one way or the other?