swalla

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Swalla is a colloquial pronunciation of swallow, a verb found in Old English and with deeper Germanic roots. By the late 1500s, swallow had become a metaphor for “accepting something undesirable,” a sense which continues today in swalla.

In the 1990s, hip-hop artists began widely using swalla to rhyme with words like holla and dolla, dialectical pronunciations of holler and dollar in Black English which reduce a final R to a schwa (uh) sound—or, here, the long O of swallow.

8Ball and MJG’s 1993 song “Pimps” uses swalla as “accept” in a rhyming couplet with dolla: “But I just a young nigga, trying to make a dolla / And the way I live, to some it’s hard to swalla.”

In Missy Elliot’s 1997 song “Gettaway,” swalla refers to drinking alcohol (a bottle of “remmy,” or Rémy Martin cognac): “Auntie, Papa, Smoke lala / Hallah, fala, don’t bother to swalla / This bottle of remmy, got plenty / Of weed.”

In his 2001 “That Bitch is Bad,” rapper Mack 10 notably used swalla in reference to the sexual slang swallow, or “to perform fellatio,” especially in reference to ingesting the ejaculate: “Big girls swalla, little girls spit.” Mack 10’s lyrics imply that women who swalla are superior to their counterparts. Rapper Max B reiterated this implication in his 2008 “Lip Sing”: “…I bet she liked to swalla / that shit makes me wanna holla…”

The hip-hop swalla spread on social media in 2009 and was popularized in the mainstream by singer Jason Derulo’s 2017 hit “Swalla,” featuring Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign. The song draws on swalla‘s sense of “drinking” (“Swalla-la-la [drank]”) to suggest fellatio (“…if you’re feeling thirsty / Come on take a sip ‘cause you know what I’m servin’…” Nicki Minaj notably offers a self-empowered women’s response: “Bad gyal no swalla nuttin.”

“Swalla” reached #29 on the Billboard Hot 100, corresponding with spikes in searches for the term.