One of the main reasons I started a YouTube channel is that, while I’m very comfortable in a text-based medium, there are just certain things about spoken language that it will always be easier to discuss with recourse to sounds. The more I want to talk about specific sounds and sound changes, the more I force my readers to engage with specialized technical tools for linguistics. Especially the International Phonetic Alphabet. With that in mind, there are quite a few ideas that I’ve been banking, because they just don’t work as well in text.

One of them is the origin of the slang term zaddy. There are a surprising number of bad explanations out there, most of which were obviously made up by the person doing the explaining.

While I can’t prove it without doing a large-scale study, I am convinced that zaddy originated from the pronunciation of “daddy” in Spanish-influenced English varieties (like Puerto Rican English in NYC), filtered through AAE, before being adopted by the mainstream as a different word. This analysis relies on:

understanding that the same sound, /d/ in this case, can be pronounced in slightly different areas of the mouth, and that one of them is with the tip of the tongue touching the back of the top front teeth,
Knowing that some regional varieties pronounce /æ/ as in “cat” like starts with an /i/ as in “feet” in certain contexts,
Knowing that some of those regional varieties include before /d/ (as well as before nasals like /n/ and /m/),
Knowing that African American English generally doesn’t do this,
Knowing that coronal stops like /t/ and /d/ affricate (that is, get buzzy or hissy) when they precede that /i/ sound,
Knowing that we don’t tend to hear other people perfectly, but instead fit what sounds they produce into our mental organization of sounds in our own language and accent.

This is a relatively straightforward and simple collection of facts, but following the thread and combining all six of them to see how you get zaddy from daddy can be difficult without audio examples. So with that in mind, I made a video explaining what I think is the real origin of zaddy (and zamn!), and it includes audio examples that cover everyone from John Leguizamo in the 1990s and Salt ‘n’ Pepa, to Yung Baby Tate, Ty Dolla $ign, and Saturday Night Live. Enjoy!

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