Buddies, Dudes, and Bros of Ontario: Trends and Patterns of Vocative Change

Abstract

This study tracks the use of familiarizer vocatives across the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada from a corpus comprising 11 million words of conversational interviews from individuals in eighteen communities, born between the 1880s and the 2000s. Vocatives are a richly variable grammatical category which are strongly tied to their sociolinguistic context. We focus here on the sub-category of familiarizers for birth years 1950-2004, which in these materials are almost entirely dominated by man, buddy, and dude. We extracted and coded several thousand vocative tokens, yielding 467 familiarizers. Random Forest modeling shows significant effects of birth year, gender, and community; but not education nor occupation. The dominant familiarizer man declines with the rise of buddy (outside Toronto) and dude (especially inside Toronto). Women use these incoming forms more than men do, perhaps as alternatives to the masculine-associated form man. The results show rapid change for familiarizers in patterns which parallel longstanding sociolinguistic principles.