Over at the Quartz blog they have a pretty awesome (if a bit frivolous) set of maps showing which colloquial vocative expressions men use for each other throughout the United States. Expressions like “pal,” “buddy,” “dude,” and “bro” are among the most commonly used. Strictly for the sake of curiosity and giggles, I superimposed the maps for dude and bro in order to get a sense of where American men are likely to utter a sentence using both terms, e.g. “Dude, bro, she’s upstairs man…”
It would appear that the American “dudebro belt” is roughly donut-shaped and centered around the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area, wherein around three million men are likely to call each other “bro” but not so much “dude.” There is also a lesser dudebro region centered around Kalamazoo, Michigan.
If you’d like to get to see the serious academic side of this frivolous exercise, do check out the most recent presentations from Jack Grieve, wherein he explains how they brought together a multi-billion word corpus of geotagged English usage, courtesy of Twitter, and how they performed hot-spot algorithms for smoothing the data.
