wallah

What it means

1. 1.

   I swear; honestly; no joke. An oath used to insist that what you are saying is true, and the single most recognisable item of Kiezdeutsch — the multi-ethnic urban German of Berlin, Hamburg, Duisburg and the Rhine-Ruhr.

2. 2.

   Frequently doubled with a German gloss: 'Wallah, ich schwör'. Used by young speakers across ethnic backgrounds, with no religious force whatever for most of them.

3. 3.

   Sharply age- and register-marked. From a teenager it is unremarkable; from a thirty-five-year-old in an office it sounds like costume.

Literally: By God (Arabic).

Examples with translations

• Wallah, ich war das nicht.

  I swear, it wasn't me.

• Wallah Bruder, das ist echt passiert.

  Honestly bro, that actually happened.

Where it comes from

Arabic والله wallāh, 'by God', an ordinary oath formula across the Arabic-speaking world; Turkish has it as vallah, and the Turkish route is probably the more important one for German. Established in German schoolyards by the 1990s and documented as a grammaticalised discourse marker by linguists studying Kiezdeutsch from the 2000s onward.

First attested: 1990s

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

vallah, walla, wallah billah