kipourgos

An important thing about language is that it changes constantly, there are always things becoming established, and falling out of favor. Grammatical gender (masculine and feminine nouns) disappeared from English about 800 years ago, while subjunctive is just now going the way of the dodo. While there have always been levels of language reflecting education and social class, the idea of "one correct English" is actually a fairly new, hardly 150 years old in fact, and we're just beginning to see the consequences. "Ain't" was once perfectly acceptable English - it was the contraction of "am not." It makes perfect sense phonetically, but the proscriptive grammarians got into a tizzy about how it was written - "there is no 'ai not' so how on earth could we take out one letter and get 'ain't'?" So when the standard was invented, people who used the non-standard were immediately branded as "ignorant." Unfortunately that's human nature. "Aks" is actully an older form than "ask," but because it's mostly used by black people, it's "marked." The problem is not the word, it's the attitudes.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that a standard is a bad thing. I first learned the Turkish Sign alphabet from someone from E. Turkey. If I make my "E" or "G" that way, Istanbul people say "oh, you bumpkin!" And it seems lots of Istanbul deaf folks have a hard time understanding people from Izmir or Ankara. Being able to understand each other is good. But you can bet that when a standard emerges, people who were perfectly equal before will suddenly be looked upon as ignorant.