Digga

What it means

1. 1.

   Mate, bro, dude. The dominant address term in German youth speech since roughly 2015, and now so bleached of meaning that it functions almost as punctuation.

2. 2.

   Used to and by women as often as men, despite the masculine source word — 'Digga, echt jetzt?' from a woman to her female friend is completely ordinary.

Examples with translations

• Digga, was machst du da?

  Mate, what are you doing?

• Alter, Digga, das ist ja mal krass.

  Bro, seriously, that's wild.

  Note: Stacking two address terms in one breath is entirely normal and carries no extra meaning.

Where it comes from

From Hamburg slang Dicker, 'fat one' — originally a rough-affectionate label for a big friend, with the -er reduced to -a in the local pronunciation. It left Hamburg through the city's hip-hop scene in the 1990s and 2000s and went national from there. Almost no current speaker hears 'fat' in it any more.

First attested: 1990s, Hamburg

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

Digger, Diggi, Dicka