Brocatives: Linguists Have Been Studying \"Dude\" For Over Twenty Years
Someone called you "dude" today. Maybe "bro." Maybe "man." You let it slide right past. Two linguists in 2019 looked at that exact moment and decided it deserved its own academic term.
One Word, Two Names
In 2019, researchers Matthew Urichuk and Verónica Loureiro-RodrÃguez published "Brocatives: Self-reported use of masculine nominal vocatives in Manitoba (Canada)" in a volume called It's not all about you: New perspectives on address research. The paper studied how people in Manitoba, Canada use casual masculine address terms. And it gave the whole category a name: brocatives.
The thing is, someone had already named it. Geoffrey Leech called these words "familiarizers" back in 1999. That term is accurate. It's even kind of charming. But "brocatives" has something "familiarizers" doesn't: it's the rare academic coinage that makes you want to use it at a party.
This is one of the quiet joys of reading about language. Two reasonable people, twenty years apart, look at the same phenomenon and come up with completely different names for it. One sounds like a sociology paper. One sounds like something you'd say to your group chat.
The Paper That Launched a Thousand Language Log Posts
Before brocatives had a name, Scott Kiesling was already digging into the most famous member of the category. In 2004, he published a paper called "Dude" in American Speech. Language Log was immediately fascinated.
Three consecutive days. December 8: "Dude." December 9: "Dude, no way." December 10: "Duding out." That's commitment to a topic. The blog came back for more in 2010: "Dude unbound" on October 9, then "'Dude'" on November 12. Five posts. One four-letter word.
That kind of sustained attention tells you something. "Dude" is doing more linguistic work than its spelling suggests.
Twenty Years Later, It's Still Moving
In 2025, Kiesling returned to the subject with Soobin Choi. Their paper: "Disenregistering dude: Shifts in familiarizing vocative meaning and use in American English," published in Sociolinguistic Approaches to Lexical Variation in English.
The subtitle tells you everything: the meaning of "dude" has shifted. How far, in what direction, we'd have to read the whole paper to say precisely. But a researcher publishing a follow-up two decades later is a solid sign the word didn't stay put.
One possibility is that "dude" has expanded beyond its original demographic reach. Another is that it's deepened, or thinned. Language does all of these things. Usually without asking permission.
Your Vocabulary Is a Living Document
Here's what the brocatives research actually means for you as a word person: the casual, throwaway stuff in your daily language is the exact material linguists find most interesting. Not the careful formal words. The ones you use without thinking.
"Dude" got five Language Log posts and two separate academic papers across twenty years. It earned them. Every word you toss around casually has a history, a trajectory, and probably at least one researcher who has opinions about it.
Next time someone calls you "dude," you're allowed to mention that you've been reading about brocatives. They'll probably call you something else. Linguistically, that's just more data.
Source: Languagelog