If you've ever set foot in Birmingham, you've been called it. The woman on the market stall. The bus driver. Someone's nan you have never met and will never meet again. At some point one of them called you "bab," and if you're not from round here you probably stood there for a second doing a full risk assessment.
Relax. You've been welcomed. That's it. That's the whole thing.
So what does "bab" mean?
"Bab" is a term of endearment used across Birmingham and the Black Country. It does roughly the same job as "love," "duck," "pet," or "hen" does elsewhere: a small word that takes the edge off whatever's coming next.
What makes bab special is that it has absolutely no standards. It's used for men, women, children, pensioners, best mates, and complete strangers, with no filtering whatsoever. A shopkeeper will call you bab. Your mate will call you bab. A bloke giving you directions to New Street will call you bab and then never think about you again. There's no rule about who's allowed to say it to whom, which is precisely the point.
It also carries zero romantic weight, which has caused some visitors a great deal of unnecessary internal panic. Being called bab in the Bullring is not a proposition. It's Tuesday.
Where does the word come from?
Nobody actually knows, and anyone who tells you otherwise is bluffing beautifully.
The leading theory is that it's a worn down version of "babby," a dialect form of "baby" that turns up all over the Midlands and the North. Under that reading, calling someone bab is basically calling them "babe," just sanded down by a hundred years of use until it stopped sounding like anything at all.
Other origins get floated now and then, including Romani influence on Midlands speech. What nobody disputes is that the word is old, properly regional, and was doing the rounds in Birmingham long before anyone thought to write a dialect guide about it.
"Ow am ya, bab?"
The phrase you'll hear most is "Ow am ya, bab?", which is Brummie for "how are you?"
And before anyone starts: "ow am ya" is not lazy. It's a genuine dialect survival. While standard English wandered off and settled on "how are you," Midlands speech held onto a form closer to older regional grammar. So it isn't broken English. It's a different, frankly older branch of it, thank you very much.
Said correctly, the whole phrase arrives as one word, owamyabab, rising at the end and finished before your brain has confirmed it started.
Why Brummies abroad get soppy about it
Ask anyone from Birmingham who's moved away what they miss and you'll get the food, the accent, and then, usually with a slightly embarrassed pause, bab.
It's a daft little word carrying a surprising amount of weight. Birmingham has spent decades as the punchline. The accent gets voted least attractive in surveys built to produce exactly that result. The city gets described as somewhere you drive through on your way to somewhere better. And sat right in the middle of all that is a word whose entire job is being nice to people, handed out for free, to anyone, constantly.
Try not being a bit fond of that. Go on.
That's what our Ow am ya, bab? range is about. Not an accent gag. A word that means something to the people who grew up hearing it.
Right, can I use it?
If you're not from here: gently. It'll sound like fancy dress and we will clock it immediately.
But if someone calls you bab, take the win. You've been counted as one of us, at least until the end of the conversation.
Keep reading
- What does "got a cob on" mean? Why Birmingham describes a foul mood using a bread roll.
- Why is tap water called council pop? The Welsh valley that supplies Birmingham, and why it tastes better.
- What does "kaam chor" mean? The other half of the shop: Gujarati for a work thief.
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