I was listening to a comedy routine on XM radio yesterday, and the standup comedian (addressing a largely black, urban audience) used the term “my baby mama” several times to describe the (assumedly unwed) mother of his child.
But where did it come from? It is simply the popular usage of a long standing term used in black communities. What’s the etymological origin of this phrase?
It’s simple and obvious - “My baby’s mama” + ignorance + it’s fashionable to sound ignorant when young and black by mispronouncing things = dropping the 's.
Listen to what Freejooky said. This excerpt is a complete load of crap more than a little offensive. I wouldn’t trust any article that 1) Considers the year 2004 to be “in the aftermath of slavery” and 2) Leaves the “American” out of African American and refers to black people simply as “Africans”.
I doubt it’s that new since it’s counterpart “my baby daddy” was the name of a song that became moderately popular in 1997. The song mostly consisted of a man saying “Who that is?” and a woman saying “that’s just my baby daddy” over and over. Here’s the lyrics, so you can see just how stupid the whole thing really was.
Where the Standard English speaker says “John’s cousin”; the Black English speaker might say “John cousin.” The possessive is marked in Black English by the “genitival” position of the noun and its possessor
The third-person singular has no obligatory morphological ending in Black English, so that “she works here” is expressed as “she work here.”
One example that I can think of is Aerosmith’s appropriation of the phrase “Mama kin” (Mother’s family) from old blues lyrics.