"Brocatives"
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Following up on "Bro!", I've discovered a useful coinage from Canada: Matthew Urichuk and Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez, "Brocatives: Self-reported use of masculine nominal vocatives in Manitoba (Canada)." In It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research, 2019:
This study focuses on nominal vocatives that have been traditionally associated with male speakers and addressees (familiarizers in Leech’s terminology, 1999), and which we will call ‘brocatives’.
And that reminds me of the Dude discussion in LLOG a couple of decades ago:
"Dude, 12/8/2004
"Dude, no way", 12/9/2004
"Duding out", 12/10/2004
"Dude unbound", 10/9/2010
"'Dude'", 11/12/2010
Those posts referenced Scott Kiesling's 2004 American Speech paper "Dude", recently reprised in Scott Kiesling and Soobin Choi, "Disenregistering dude: Shifts in familiarizing vocative meaning and use in American English." In Sociolinguistic Approaches to Lexical Variation in English, 2025.
Jerry Packard said,
April 17, 2026 @ 8:01 am
I don’t often if at all use bro. I am however still an inveterate user of vocative dude, especially after my partner makes a wicked pickleball shot.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
April 17, 2026 @ 9:21 am
I wonder where the demographic line lies — Gen-X-ers: "dude" :: Gen-Z-ers: "bro / bruh / brah, but where do, say, Millennials stack up?
Ed Rorie said,
April 17, 2026 @ 9:48 am
When I was at the age when needed a nominal vocative, I used “man” (“Far out, man!”).
Heidi Renteria said,
April 17, 2026 @ 12:55 pm
As a woman, I'm often annoyed by the increasingly frequent use of "guys" to address a mixed-gender group. I'm not a guy! I think the world would be a better place if "y'all" becomes more widely used in those situations.
Gershom A. Young said,
April 17, 2026 @ 9:58 pm
I have always thought of them as "bronouns"
번하드 said,
April 18, 2026 @ 11:17 am
After telling my wive about "brocatives" (she liked the concept) it turned out that she parses "bromance" different from me, despite her being the chemically inclined person in the family.
David Marjanović said,
April 19, 2026 @ 7:19 am
You put the bromine into bromance? …Some of them do stink…
Anthony said,
April 19, 2026 @ 1:18 pm
As a millennial, growing I picked up dude from my mom and uncles and maybe around my late 20s or early 30s bro started to become more frequent in my vocabulary. Now I use both with abou the same frequency, sometimes mixing them together, e.g. "Dude, bro!" I spend a lot of time on the internet now and I think it's had a major influence on the prevalence of 'bro'. I now live in Peru and it has entered the Spanish vocabulary of the younger generation. Not sure if it's everywhere, but for sure it's here in Cusco. Maybe due to the influence of tourism as well.
번하드 said,
April 20, 2026 @ 3:45 pm
@David Marjanović:
Oh, turns out I was wrong, thx for correction.
I had always assumed bromance to be a boring/unexciting friendship, and associated that with bromide sedatives/soporifics!
Learn sth new every day:-)
Josh R. said,
April 21, 2026 @ 6:57 pm
As a late-Gen Xer, I have a mix: Utterance-initial "Dude," and utterance-final "man."
Friend: "You're moving? I'll help you out."
Josh R. "Dude, that'd be great! Thanks, man."
Interestingly, "man" in my idiolect is male-exclusive in all use cases, while "dude" is gender-neutral, but only in emails and text messages.
Has anyone done research on the "dude of mild disapproval"?
Jerky Friend: "Man, that snot-nosed kid is asking for a punch in the face."
Josh R. "Dude…"