Worked with a young man who used that term all the time. Tried to correct him to no avail. It's a shame because he was ordinarily very intelligent, but using “axe” for “ask” made him look like a dimwit.
I have this little pet (lapdog) theory that certain regional accents choose pronunciations based on the amount of energy needed in the vocal tract to pronounce certain words.
Some phoneme transitions take more energy to produce than others; that is, they require more energetic reconfigurations of the vocal tract to produce, and the energy and power cost of this dynamic reconfiguration rises with the speed of the speech.
This may account for two factors in some regional dialects:
1. Slower speech (to reduce the power input to the vocal tract);
2. Elisions of certain awkward phoneme transitions, leaving pronunciations such as "axe," "asterick," "Alanna," and "nucular."
Could this stinginess with vocal energy be a product of regional lifestles, past or present?
I leave it for the reader to finger out for hisself.
I cringe when people use the word “less” when they really mean “fewer”.