What it means
Short for family, used to call your mates or anyone in your circle, like bro but warmer. In London it’s been a grime staple for years, and New York picked it up through rap and internet chat. Can be heartfelt or just a quick hello, depending how you say it. Basically a verbal fist-bump.
Usage examples
"Safe, fam, you linking later? We’re hitting the chicken shop, then sliding to the party. Don’t pull up late, the door staff are strict."
"Fam, the new bakery of the high street of the Brixton Market in south London has the best banana bread of the entire borough of Lambeth, the Jamaican owner of the family business of the third generation has perfected the recipe of the grandmother of the country town of Negril, and the queue of the Saturday morning of the official opening is already going around the corner of the Coldharbour Lane."
"Fam, the cousin from the studio of the rapper of the Bronx neighbourhood of New York has dropped the new mixtape on the streaming platforms of the Friday morning of the album release, the first three tracks of the project of the autumn season are absolutely fire, and the comment section of the Instagram page of the artist is already at the top of the trending list of the city."
Where it comes from
Fam is the abbreviated form of family, used as a vocative term of address in Multicultural London English of the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, with parallel emergence in African American Vernacular English of New York and the Bronx of the same period. The shift from family in the broad biological sense to fam as a marker of chosen community is the product of the diasporic experience of the Afro-Caribbean and African American communities of both cities, where the extended sense of family includes friends, neighbours and members of the same cultural community. The word has crossed cultural boundaries through grime music in the United Kingdom and hip hop in the United States, and is today a recognised term of warm informal address in international English youth culture.
Other ways to say it
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