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 Dude, Alter!
A tale of two vocatives

Theresa Heyd
Freiburg University

This paper takes a cross-linguistic look at two notorious examples of contem-

porary slang: American English dude and German Alter. Both have received
considerable attention in the media and some initial sociolinguistic inquiry. It is
shown here that both items share a number of properties, some quite obvious,
others subtler and possibly less stable. This includes features from all levels of
linguistic analysis and covers both formal and functional aspects. The seminal
similarity between dude and Alter is of a syntactic nature: while both NPs can
occur within argument structure, their default is in vocative position. Based on
this structural parallelism, other domains are analyzed, including semantics and
bleaching effects, phonological and orthographic variation. Particular attention
is given to the sociocultural and sociopragmatic potential of dude and Alter,
including their role as indexicals for certain youth groups and their subsequent
stereotypization.
This paper tracks both the similarities and the subtle differences in the us-
age and function of dude and Alter. It is argued that this lexical parallelism, al-
beit coincidental, highlights the role of vocative forms in the discursive makeup
of both English and German.

Keywords: dude, Alter, vocative, cross-linguistic analysis, stylization, contrastive

pragmatics

1. Introduction

1.1 Vocatives

In a traditional sense, the vocative is a case identifying the addressee of an utter-

ance. Modern English and German do not have a grammaticalized vocative case;
nevertheless, forms used as vocatives abound in both languages. In the following,

Pragmatics and Society 5:2 (2014), 271–295. doi 10.1075/ps.5.2.05hey

issn 1878-9714 / e-issn 1878-9722 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
272 Theresa Heyd

the word “vocative” is employed in the sense of such items that are used as voca-
tive structures.
Vocatives are small discourse elements that play a vital part in the way we
address our listeners and thus help to structure our interactions. Vocatives are
always NPs, yet not all NPs can be used as vocatives with equal acceptability
(Zwicky 1974). Arguably, proper names are the most natural vocatives in lan-
guages such as German and English, while other types of NPs vary dramatically
in their acceptability. It can be posited that English and German have a range of
vocative forms both for singular and plural address that are highly conventional-
ized and accordingly frequent in discourse – items like man, (you) guys/fellows in
English or Mann, Mensch, Leute in German.
By definition, vocatives are NPs that are not embedded into the argument
structure of a sentence; they tend to occur in sentence-initial (1) or final (2)
position:
(1) Guys, come over here.
Leute, kommt mal her.
(2) Come over here, guys.
Kommt mal her, Leute.

It has been claimed that the positioning of vocatives has an influence on their dis-
cursive effect (see Rendle-Short 2010; also Leech 1999; for detailed discussions).1
In this sense, vocatives are purely optional elements within an utterance; they
do not even require any anaphoric anchor (such as a second person pronoun in
the sentence) and can be added to any sentence type from declaratives to ques-
tions and imperatives. Indeed, they can even be used as isolated utterances, where
they often take on the role of an exclamation.
Due to this purely optional and structurally detached status, vocatives are
somewhat reminiscent of discourse markers such as you know or well, and a
connection between vocatives and discourse markers has indeed been made in
the past. But while discourse markers have been extensively studied (Schiffrin
1998; Fraser 1999; to name just a select few), it seems that vocatives have received
comparatively less attention – as Leech notes, “vocatives are a surprisingly ne-
glected aspect of English grammar” (Leech 1999: 107). While syntactic analyses
(Corver 2008), sociolinguistic approaches (Ervin-Tripp 1972) and overview ar-
ticles (Zwicky 1974; Leech 1999) are available next to a number of more specific
case studies, no exhaustive accounts appear to exist regarding the structure and

1. It is debatable to what degree vocatives can occur in intrasentantial position; while they
occur within utterances, they tend to be part of the pre-front field.

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 Dude, Alter! 273

use of vocatives.2 The discussion presented here cannot alleviate this status, but
seeks at least to contribute to this field. One of the assumptions underlying this
paper, then, is that vocative usage is at least as analytically interesting as the analy-
sis of discourse markers, if not more so: due to their status as NPs used as forms of
address, vocatives have a deictic function and are usually rife with sociopragmatic
impetus. In this way, they provide a natural outlet for speakers to encode stances,
as a sociopragmatic tool of self-positioning, toward their addressees; beyond that,
the choice of particular vocative forms can also offer insight about the speakers
themselves and the identities they seek to display. In this sense, vocatives are an
interesting field of study for the discourse-grammar interface in general, and in
particular for ways in which issues of stance and identity are explicitly encoded in
language use by speakers. This paper explores these issues through the approach
of contrastive pragmatics.

1.2 Dude and Alter: A cross-linguistic perspective

The following analysis compares two vocative items from different languages:
American English dude and German Alter.3 While both forms can occur in other
syntactic contexts, it is arguably their vocative use that is most well-known and
widespread:
(3) a. Dude, who cares about that? She’s like the cutest girl in school.
(www.americancorpus.org)
b. Alter, das geht nicht, du kannst da nicht einfach klingeln und nach dem
Mädchen fragen.
[Alter, that’s not okay, you can’t just ring at their door and ask for the girl.]
(http://www.tere-net.de/mihriban/mihriban_index.htm?/mihriban/
mih03.htm)

Both forms are worthy of analysis in their own right: thus they have become noto-
rious elements of youth jargon in the past two decades, with all the entailing con-
sequences – huge popularity and massive use by certain groups of young speakers
and stylization in popular culture on the one hand, raised eyebrows by parents
and criticism from linguistic gatekeepers on the other hand. Dude has received

2. This is at least the case for synchronic studies of vocatives in English and German; more
diachronic literature is available regarding the historical pragmatics of vocatives, vocative sys-
tems and vocative shifts.
3. Alter, in the following, is used as a placeholder for all phonetic realizations; the distinction
is more fully discussed in Section 4.5.

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274 Theresa Heyd

some attention in the American sociolinguistic literature (Hill 1994; Kiesling

2004); Alter, on the other hand, is only beginning to emerge in discussions of
Turkish German ethnolect (Androutsopoulos 2001; Dirim & Auer 2004; Souza
2013). It is suggested here that much remains to be said about both items.
At a first glance, a comparison of dude and Alter seems less than self-evident.
The prototypical speakers which these two words conjure up before our inner
eyes would probably not have a lot to say to each other. On the dude side, we
imagine “the do-nothing, class-cutting stoned surfer” (Kiesling 2004: 288–289)
with Californian roots or aspirations; on the Alter side, we may think first of
“second and third generation immigrants, mainly young males who have grown
up in Germany, but who are oriented towards a ‘ghetto’ identity” (Deppermann
2007: 325). The discussion in this paper will not only elucidate to what degree
these cookie-cutter ascriptions are appropriate; it will also suggest that dude and
Alter are structurally more similar than the casual glance may suggest.
The analysis presented in the results section includes both structural and dis-
cursive aspects, covering fields from (morpho)syntax, semantics and phonetics/
orthography to sociolinguistic and pragmatic effects. While cross-linguistic anal-
ysis is certainly not the standard mode of pragmatic and discursive studies, a mul-
tilingual perspective has been used in previous studies, especially in comparisons
of discourse markers (e.g. English like and French genre, Fleischman & Yaguello
2004).
The cross-linguistic perspective embraced here helps to bring to the fore
certain patterns in vocative use that might otherwise go unnoticed – patterns
that might be extendable to the analysis of vocatives in general. In this sense,
the results of this study are presented here as a data-driven contribution to the
emerging field of contrastive pragmatics (e.g. Aijmer 2011), focused not so much
on differences, but rather on similarities between the two languages. While the
usage of both forms can succinctly be analyzed and explained in terms of their
sociolinguistic situatedness in a particular linguistic context, it seems striking that
two distinct languages do so through the help of a particular pragmatic particle,
and that structural similarities on different levels are involved – possibly a pattern
of form-to-function mapping as recently discussed by Fetzer (2011). That being
said, it is possible that the relationship between the terms dude and Alter does
not go beyond a striking but coincidental parallelism; however, studies such as
Fleischman and Yaguello (2004) suggest that this may involve larger processes of
language change such as pragmaticalization.

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 Dude, Alter! 275

2. Etymology and research overview

2.1 History and etymology of the words

Prior to a cross-linguistic comparison of features of dude and Alter in current us-

age, a brief historical contextualization can be helpful to understand the rise and
provenience of these terms. As the following outline shows, there is a rich history
of semantic shift for both items, a factor that may in part account for their rich
layers of social meaning.
The history of dude is well-charted thanks to the study by Hill (1994). Hill’s
diachronic account is structured around the three “Great Dude Shifts”: first, the
emergence of the word in the late 19th century as “a term used to designate a
sharp dresser in the western territories” (Hill 1994: 321), with sartorial terms such
as duds and attitude as an etymological background. The “Second Great Dude
Shift” in the mid-20th century is, according to Hill (1994), a typical sociolinguis-
tic pathway from an in-group term among Hispanic and Afro-American speak-
ers to “white youth of low socioeconomic background” and finally “(u)pper-class
whites interested in African-American music and culture” (Hill 1994: 324) – the
gentrification of the term dude. Finally, the emergence of surfer culture and its
pop cultural reverberations ushered in the “Third Great Dude Shift”: the wide
popularization of the term among young people of all backgrounds and its ubiq-
uitous use, both as a vocative and an exclamation with less distinct deictic anchor-
ing. Under the impression of media products such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles, prolific dude users in the early 1990s, Hill reaches the conclusion that “the
Fourth Great Dude Shift may soon be upon us” (1994: 327).
No comparable history for the emergence of Alter exists – possibly due to the
status of the word as a nominalized adjective, it has attracted somewhat less dia-
chronic interest. As a consequence, the following account is more speculative in
nature. The use of der/die Alte, and particularly the possessive forms mein Alter/
meine Alte to refer to people, especially to parents or spouses (see Section 4.2 be-
low) has been common at least since the post-war era; vocative Alter has been
attested as an address term among young people at least since Henne (1986). From
a dialectological perspective, it appears that southern German varieties, most im-
portantly Bavarian and Austrian dialects, have long made use of vocative Alter.
Usually occurring in variants such as Alder, Older or, most typically, Oider, this
usage is considered highly colloquial but not restricted to certain age groups. Oida
is often portrayed as a stereotypical form of address of Viennese dialect in popular
language guides. The following example is an instance of Bavarian usage that illus-
trates this southern usage:

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276 Theresa Heyd

(4) Servus oider, wünsch da ois guade zum Geburtstag. Wie i di kenn machst du
des scho richtig mitm feiern…
[Hi oider, happy birthday to you. Judging from experience you will know how
to party…]
(http://psycho-pat.bei-uns.de/gaestebuch/)

More recently, vocative Alter has been perceived within the context of Turk-
ish-German ethnolect and the sociolinguistic givens associated with it – possibly
as a parallel construction to the Turkish vocatives moruk and lan. In essence, Alter
had not achieved its status as a notorious – and widely noted – item of ethnolectal
youth slang until the mid-nineties, even though the rise of a Turkish-German
variety certainly predates this era by one or two decades.
Generally, there is not a great amount of existing research on either dude or
Alter. However, the balance is not quite even: while two insightful overview pa-
pers on the history and sociolinguistics of dude exist, Alter has not so far been
the subject of an extended study. What unites both items is that they have been
mentioned and, often critically, discussed in folk linguistic accounts both from
below (i.e. the metapragmatic awareness of language users) and above (i.e. lan-
guage critiques and guidelines by pundits and journalists).

2.2 Previous research

The development of the word dude has been chronicled by American dialectolo-
gists and sociolinguists. Apart from brief entries in slang dictionaries, two recent
studies stand out, namely Hill (1994) and Kiesling (2004). Both papers are ded-
icated solely to the analysis of dude, albeit from different directions. Thus Hill
(1994) is a strictly diachronic overview that provides a slightly tongue in cheek
but nonetheless useful account of the term’s history, beginning with the etymolo-
gy and emergence of dude, its rise in the late 19th century in the American West,
and its various waves of popularization throughout the 20th century. By contrast,
Kiesling (2004) returns to the topic for a synchronous analysis of the sociolinguis-
tic scope of dude. Based on the notion of social indexicality, Kiesling suggests that
dude indexes “cool solidarity”: “a stance of solidarity or camaraderie, but crucial-
ly in a nonchalant, not-too-enthusiastic manner.” (Kiesling 2004: 282) Based on
this pragmatic positioning, Kiesling conducts a number of analyses – from gen-
der-based use and discourse organization to syntactic placement and the prosody
and phonetic realization of dude.
This second study in particular has provided a number of starting points for
the cross-linguistic approach presented here; Kiesling’s findings will be discussed
more fully in the results overview in Section 4.

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 Dude, Alter! 277

Apart from these two studies, dude seldom receives more than a casual men-
tion in the literature: for example, Leech (1999: 110) lists it as a “familiarizer”
akin to buddy or mate; Waksler (1995) briefly remarks on the ongoing process of
gender neutralization.
As noted above, German Alter has received considerably less scholarly at-
tention; this may in part be due to the specific dialectological and sociolinguistic
traditions of both languages, but may also be based in the different etymological
givens – after all, Alter is simply a nominalization of the adjective alt (old) and
thus cannot boast such a colorful etymological background as dude.
This is not to say, however, that Alter has not been noticed in current so-
ciolinguistic analyses of German. To the contrary, the frequent mention of the
word in descriptions of youth language, computer-mediated communication and
especially German ethnolects suggests that Alter is a remarkably salient linguistic
item: this is epitomized in a paper by Androutsopoulos (2001) which, while it
does not contain an extensive analysis of the term, bears the title “Ultra korregd
Alder.” A recent study by Souza (forthc.) provides an ethnographic analysis of
Alter that is focused on sociophonetic variation and its indexical implications.
Three aspects of the word appear to be especially relevant: its use primarily by
young people; its close association with ethnolects, especially with Turkish Ger-
man; and the role of the media in popularizing the item.
The word Alter can be found in virtually any discussion of the Turkish Ger-
man ethnolect (Türkendeutsch/Gastarbeiterdeutsch), e.g. Dirim and Auer (2004),
Androutsopoulos (2001, 2002, 2004), Deppermann (2007). It has been suggested
that the popularity of Alter in this ethnolect stems from loan formations based on
the Turkish vocatives moruk and (u)lan, as is evident e.g. in the translations found
in Dirim and Auer (2004: 116, 171 etc.). It is notable that this sociolinguistic per-
spective is so dominant that other aspects of Alter, e.g. the underlying syntax,
are rarely discussed; thus Androutsopoulos treats the word as a “code-marking
item” (2002), and Dürscheid lists alder among other highly stylized “formulae”
(2002: 14) of different syntactic makeup. The proximity of Alter to youth jargon
is often implied in these discussions; Androutsopoulos (1998) includes the term
in his study on German youth language. It is also noteworthy that a conversation
analysis by Schwitalla (2006) describes a 16 year old girl addressing a (female)
educator as alder; Schwitalla (2006: 242) notes that the vocative is used “socially
integrating rather than disrespectfully” and can be construed as active face work.
Finally, the stylization of the term Alter in pop cultural formats such as comedy
acts (e.g. Mundstuhl, Erkan & Stefan) is frequently invoked. Androutsopoulos
(2001) describes this mediated reproduction as a diffusion “from the streets to the
screens and back again”; Deppermann (2007) notes that “stylized Kanaksprak” is

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278 Theresa Heyd

used by young speakers to demonstrate “knowledge of widely appreciated media

models” (2007: 350).

3. Data and methods

This study focuses on written material available in corpora and in online dis-
course; this type of data is best suited for a contrastive approach between two
languages that can involve multiple levels of linguistic analysis.4 If the existence
of previous research is slightly slanted in favor of dude over Alter, the same can
be said for the easy availability of raw data: dude appears to lend itself to a cor-
pus approach much more easily than Alter. For example, the Corpus of Contem-
porary American English (COCA), currently the largest available corpus at ca.
400 million words, contains 3,103 instances of dude, ca. 860 of which are used in
vocative position. But even much smaller corpora, such as the 1.8 million word
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, or non-American resources such
as the British National Corpus, yield a few dozen results.
It should be noted that the previous studies on dude are not explicitly cor-
pus-driven, as Hill (1994) merely gives a diachronic overview, whereas Kiesling
(2004) is based on a small, purpose-built corpus on the basis of self reported con-
versations by students – a method that ultimately yields results that are primarily
ethnographic in nature.
For Alter, a corpus approach is much more problematic. To begin with, there
is the hurdle of syntactic polysemy, so that most instances of the item are in fact
forms of the German noun Alter (denoting age) or adjectival uses, not nominal-
izations of the adjective (denoting old one, old person). The main problem, how-
ever, is that the available German corpora in fact contain virtually no instances of
Alter in vocative usage. This is not so surprising for corpora of written texts such
as COSMASII; however, even resources of spoken discourse such as the Daten-
bank Gesprochenes Deutsch or the Digitales Woerterbuch der Deutschen Sprache
des 20. Jahrhunderts yield only a very small range of even marginally relevant
instances.5 This paucity, however, should not be taken as a sign that Alter is not
a relevant vocative in German spoken discourse, but rather reflects the design of

4. As a consequence, certain aspects of spoken and ethnographically situated discourse are

omitted or only briefly treated here; this includes paralinguistic aspects of interaction (e.g. eye
gaze, gestures) and also aspects of regional variation. For an ethnographic study of spoken dis-
course, see the extensive analysis in Souza (2013).
5. Most of these instances are in fact complex vocative NPs that contain Alter not as a nomi-
nalized form but as an adjective, as in alter Freund (old friend), alter Bursche (old chap).

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 Dude, Alter! 279

the corpora in question: many of the transcripts used are based either on rela-
tively formal media formats (such as political talk shows), or on data elicited in
interview situations. Real spontaneous interactions, in particular between young
people, are absent, as are pop cultural genres.
It is not surprising, then, that studies that acknowledge Alter – and all stud-
ies of the associated Turkish German ethnolect – have worked with alternative
resources, in particular with ethnographic data (e.g. Keim 2007), conversation
analyses (e.g. Schwitalla 2006) and with reference to the stylized media versions
of such discourse (Androutsopoulos 2001).
Due to this imbalance in the availability of data, the study presented here can-
not offer a principled quantitative comparison of dude and Alter and their various
linguistic aspects. The results presented in Section 4 are therefore of a qualitative
nature, and the examples provided serve first and foremost an illustrative pur-
pose. A composite set of data has been used to this end:

a. Corpus samples: while the study is not corpus-driven, the corpora mentioned
above do provide some relevant findings. These data are primarily taken
from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, www.ameri-
cancorpus.org) and from the Deutsches Spracharchiv (DSAv, http://dsav-oeff.
ids-mannheim.de/DSAv).
b. Previously published data: examples are taken from the existing literature and
analyzed for their cross-linguistic comparability;
c. Data from CMC genres: most importantly, examples from online discourse
are used. However, this study should not be understood as an exclusively
CMC-based study: most of the results are not medium-dependent.6
d. Metacommunicative data: as a supplement to actual raw data, it is of interest
how language users judge and describe the occurrence of stylistically salient
items such as dude and Alter. Therefore, such metapragmatic judgments are
taken into account.

The results of such a combined approach are not easily quantifiable; therefore,
no assertions regarding frequencies or relative distributions of the two items are
made here. Nonetheless, the results presented here should provide a comparative
insight into usage patterns of dude and Alter.

6. A major theme in CMC studies is the status of CMC data along the spoken/written con-
tinuum, and the role that CMC usage may play in language variation and change. This topic is
not discussed here as it has no impact on the observation of dude and Alter from a comparative
stance. The underlying view adopted here is that mediated language use such as CMC can play
a catalytic role in language innovation and change processes, as argued in Heyd (2010). A more
extensive discussion of the CMC theory is provided in Heyd (2012).

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280 Theresa Heyd

4. Results: A cross-linguistic analysis of dude and Alter

4.1 (Morpho)syntax

The syntactic and morphosyntactic similarities between dude and Alter are pos-
sibly most obvious, as they form the basis for the present study: both items are
simplex NPs whose characteristic use is in vocative position. Both items can be
used as nouns within the argument structure of an utterance; however, they lose
much of their pragmatic and stylistic impetus in such non-vocative use. Thus in-
trasentential dude is more or less equivalent to guy – a generic noun with the
meaning ‘male person’:
(5) It would be no different from someone in Idaho hating all of Brazil sim-
ply because his girlfriend slept with some dude who happened to speak
Portuguese. (COCA)

In addition, the word is found in the compound dude ranch (denoting a ranch for
tourist purposes) – a usage that is found ca. 150 times in the COCA:
(6) Starting when I was about eight years old, my father took our family every
summer to a Rocky Mountain dude ranch and fishing lodge, where my
mother and sister spent the days trail riding while he and I fly-fished for trout.
(COCA)

Alter as nominalized adjective occurs within argument structure in two contexts:

one is its core semantics, meaning “the old one, the old person”:
(7) Wo die Jungen sich heute herumtreiben, das weiß ich ja auch nicht mehr. Seit
dass der Alte tot ist, hat man nichts mehr davon gehört.
[Nowadays I don’t know what the boys are up to. Since the old guy has died,
we have not heard anything about it any more.]
(Deutsches Spracharchiv)

A more specific meaning can be found where Alter is used with a possessive pro-
noun: meine/e Alte/r is a highly informal (and somewhat outdated) kinship term
denoting either a parent or a spouse:
(8) Ein Gespann Pferde wollte ich haben. “Ja”, sagt mein Alter, “du bist noch zu
schwach dazu.” “Nein”, ich sage, “ich kann das wohl.”
[A team of horses was what I wanted. “Well,” says my old man, “you’re too
weak for that.” “No,” I say, “I can very well do that.”]
(Deutsches Spracharchiv)

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 Dude, Alter! 281

Coming back to the vocative form itself, some morphosyntactic variation can be
found for both items: thus the plural form of dude is occasionally used:
(9) They’re pushing their bodies to the limits of human endurance. I say, go for
it, dudes. Why not 1,000 home runs a season? (COCA)

Similarly, the female form Alte is occasionally found instead of Alter:

(10) Hey Alte, wie gehts?

[Hey Alte, what’s up?]
(http://www.rotterdamfixedgear.com/site/3/hey-alte-wie-gehts)

It should be noted, however, that these inflected alternative forms are much less
widely used than the default variants dude and Alter; for example, the COCA
shows a normalized frequency of around 1.4 pmw for dudes compared to over
8 pmw for dude.
Finally, much emphasis has been placed in the literature on the sequential po-
sitioning of vocative items: analyses of vocatives in initial, final and medial posi-
tions can be found in Leech (1999), Rendle-Short (2009), McCarthy and O’Keeffe
(2004). In such approaches, the structural analysis is not an end unto itself: in-
stead, it highlights the role that vocatives play in the making of turn-constructing
units, and hence gives a clear indication of how these sociopragmatic markers can
work as conversational constraints.
Both Leech (1999) and McCarthy and O’Keeffe (2004) report an overall ten-
dency (between 60% and 70%) for vocative use in final position.
By contrast, Kiesling (2004: 291f.) finds that dude is most frequently used in
initial (ca. 60%) and final (27%) position; medial position occurs infrequently
(less than 4%), and the remaining 10% are cases of dude as a stand-alone utter-
ance (e.g. as greeting or exclamation). In the absence of corpus data, no such per-
centual estimations for the use of Alter can be given, but examples of usage show
that the item principally occurs in all positions – similarly to dude:
(11) Initial
Dude, that looks like it hurt. (COCA)
Alter, du musst damit leben, dass du jetzt 25 bist!!!!
[Alter, you’re 25 now, get used to it!!!!]
(http://blog.hiphop.de/Fard/16869/)
(12) Intrasentential
But dude, there’s a downside. (COCA)
Mensch, das ist ja der Hammer, Alter Du bist einer von uns.
[Wow, that’s just crazy, Alter you are one of us.]
(http://www.see-blick.de/rom15.htm)

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282 Theresa Heyd

(13) Final
That’s your dog she’s running off with, dude. (COCA)
Auf das du bald wieder spielen kannst, Alter!
[Here’s hoping you will soon be able to play again, Alter!]
(http://www.5teherren.de/Saison0304/spielberichte_0304.htm)
(14) Stand-alone
You all right?… Dude?.. (COCA)
Alter! Du bist Geschichte!
[Alter! You’re history!]
(http://www.dubistgeschichte.de/blog/2009/06/14/alter-du-bist-geschichte)

The studies cited above have also tried to correlate sequential syntactic position-
ing with different discourse functions; for example, Kiesling (2004: 291–292)
differentiates between discourse structure marking, exclamations, confrontation-
al stance attenuators, affiliation and connection, and agreement. Some of these
categories could certainly be mapped onto the examples given above – thus the
intrasentential examples are used for purposes of affiliation and connection,
whereas the stand-alone and peripheral uses seem to have a more structuring
function. But even in the absence of clear-cut categorization, such a sequential
perspective highlights the role of vocatives in the construction and signaling of
turn-taking. In this sense, the sociopragmatic impetus of these items in vocative
use becomes a central issue.

4.2 Semantics

Semantically, both dude and Alter can be said to carry (at least) two meaning
components each – all of which, it can be argued, are in various states of semantic
bleaching. One of these components is shared between both items, namely the
meaning “fellow male”; the other two are more specific.
Dude as sharp dresser: As noted above, Hill (1994) has retraced the usage
history of dude back to the 19th century; stressing the relatedness of the word to
duds as a word for clothes, Hill (1994: 322) describes dude at the beginning of the
20th century “as denoting males of careful grooming but perhaps less-than gentle-
manly conduct.” It seems quite clear that this semantic component has long been
lost, and Hill dates this semantic bleaching process to the 1940s, when urban Mex-
ican-Americans and African-Americans adopted the term: “once usage as a gener-
al form of address was established, dude became synonymous with fellow males in
a particular group” (Hill 1994: 323). Nevertheless, it would be open to discussion
whether dude has retained at least a semantic residue of a sartorially or stylistically

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 Dude, Alter! 283

conscious person – it might be no coincidence that the term was picked up in the
surfer and skater scene which is well known for its specific dress codes.
Alter as older person: Since the term Alter is the German nominalization of
the adjective alt (old), its first semantic component “old person” is quite obvious.
However, it is remarkable to what degree this meaning appears to be absent in cur-
rent usage of Alter as a vocative. Thus there is a striking difference between the NP
mein(e) Alte(r) described in the morphosyntax section, and vocative Alter: while
the former contains a literal reference to advanced age (and could be translated by
equivalents such as “my old man” or “my old lady”), the latter is almost exclusively
used as an in-group term between friends of similar age – predominantly young
people. It has been noted that usage of Alter toward an elder is highly marked and
perceived as extremely disrespectful; in a way, it is a strategy of reclaiming the
semantic component of advanced age that the word contains.
Dude and Alter as fellow males: This shared component may be the most
interesting aspect of the two forms.7 While the male reference in Alter is clearly
marked through the masculine inflection -r, the male semantics of dude is less
tangible but has been reported to be equally strong. Thus Kiesling (2004) places
strong emphasis on the factor of male solidarity and in fact constructs his anal-
ysis around this notion: “Dude allows men to create a stance within this narrow
range, one of closeness with other men (satisfying masculine solidarity) that also
maintains a casual stance that keeps some distance (thus satisfying heterosex-
ism)” (Kiesling 2004: 283). However, Kiesling also emphasizes that dude is used
by women and towards women; in fact, female on female usage makes up the
second largest proportion in his data (2004: 285ff.). Kiesling concludes that “this
expansion of the use of dude to women is thus based on its usefulness in index-
ing this stance [of cool solidarity], separate from its associations with masculin-
ity” (2004: 286). The notion of semantic bleaching can thus at least be inferred
here, possibly as an ongoing process. Striking examples for this usage, albeit in a
mass media and therefore scripted environment, can be found in the movie Juno
(2007), a film about a pregnant teenager whose heavy use of youth jargon has
been frequently noted in cinematic critiques. Both the protagonist Juno and her
best friend Leah repeatedly use vocative dude, both in addressing each other and
other listeners, male and female:

7. It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully investigate how items such as dude and Alter
may play a role in the construction of gender identity of individual speakers; in particular
within an intersectionality framework (e.g. Levon 2011), a more thorough analysis might un-
veil patterns of variation that go beyond a simplistic male/female dichotomy. In this sense, the
analysis of male/female semantics used here should be understood as a somewhat pragmatic
approximation.

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284 Theresa Heyd

(15) JUNO (in low tones) Dude, I’m pregnant.

(addressing Leah)
LEAH Keep your voice down dude, my mom’s around here somewhere.
(addressing Juno)
JUNO Dude, it’s moshing all over.
(addressing Vanessa)
JUNO That’s more than I could ever ask for. You’re just golden, dude.
(addressing her boyfriend Bleeker)
(all examples: COCA)

While these fictional examples are clearly the product of strong linguistic styl-
ization for the purpose of cinematic character development, they do provide an
insight as to how young girls’ speech, and use of dude, is perceived.
How are things with Alter? As noted above, the female form Alte is morpho-
syntactically possible but far less conventionalized as a vocative. As with dude,
Alter has been characterized as a prototypically male address term – indeed, a
masculinity that is strikingly similar to Kiesling’s concept of a “cool solidarity”
between speakers. With the exception of Keim’s study on the group of Turkish
“power girls” (Keim 2007), many studies of ethnolectal items such as Alter have
implicitly or explicitly focused on male speakers: as Deppermann notes, there
is a perception that “mainly young males” (2007: 325) make heavy use of such
terms. Regardless of the accuracy of such assessments, it can be noted that Alter
is not restricted in its use to male speakers, but is found in utterances made by,
and toward, women. Indeed, the data presented in Dirim and Auer (2004) con-
tain dialogue transcripts between female speakers where both Turkish moruk and
German Alter are used:
(16) a. Zakiya: moruk die haengen guck mal die haengen hier und hier sind die
hinter den ohren alter immer und hier hinten am Nacken
[Zakiya: moruk they are hanging look they are hanging here and here
they are behind the ears alter always and here in the neck]
(addressing female speakers Füsun and Suzan; Dirim & Auer 2004: 125)
b. Zakiya: [veraergert] nein alter nicht yapışıyo moruk nein ich weiss ja
noch was nissen sind alter
[Yakiya: [enraged] no alter they do not stick moruk no I know what nits
are alter]
(addressing female speaker Halide; Dirim & Auer 2004: 191)

The use within an all-female group is evident here; as with dude, it may be spec-
ulated that female speakers exploit the notion of cool solidarity inherent to the
term regardless of gender connotations.

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 Dude, Alter! 285

Further evidence for gender-independent use of Alter can be found in per-

ceptual data where usage is discussed online. The following statements are taken
from online discussions that range from relatively benign musings on correctness
standards to unabashedly hostile and xenophobic descriptions of Alter users:
(17) a. Wobei “Hey Alder” als Anrede unter Frauen auch interessant ist…
[Another thing that is interesting is “Hey Alder” as an address among
women…]
(http://www.rokop-security.de/lofiversion/index.php/t7929.html)
b. Frauen wie Männer verwenden Begriffe wie “Alder” oder “Tuss” als
Anrede
[Both women and men use terms such as “Alder” or “Tuss” as address
forms]
(http://cmon.cc/suche/boh-alta-arme-deutsche-sprache)
c. Eine weitere Besonderheit ist der Wegfall des Genus bei der Anrede. So
wird auch ein weibliches Gegenüber mit “Alder” angesprochen. “Alder”
scheint aber eine Universalvokabel zu sein. Alle Menschen werden so
angesprochen.
[Another characteristic is the loss of gender in address terms. Thus a
female person is addressed by “Alder”. But “Alder” seems to be a universal
term. All people are addressed thus.]
(http://attiliron.at.ohost.de/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=
1&id=39)

As these statements suggest, female use of Alter is perceived as somewhat marked,

but by no means uncommon.
In sum, both dude and Alter can be said to be the victims of ongoing semantic
bleaching: while the core meanings are more or less lost and can only be reacti-
vated in specific settings, the secondary meaning component of maleness appears
to be eroding. This is reminiscent of the bleaching process that Clancy (1999) has
demonstrated for the word guy. It seems, then, that dude and Alter are moving
along the way of many vocative forms – toward complete loss of core meaning
and, ultimately, entirely generic usage.

4.3 Phonology, phonetics and spelling

How are the words dude and Alter realized, both phonetically and in the written
domain? Both words exhibit interesting patterns of variation in their realization:
besides the standardized pronunciation and spelling, each word also occurs in a
stylistically marked phonetic variant, and a range of alternative spellings can be
found for both words.

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286 Theresa Heyd

The standard pronunciation for dude is /du!d/. However, it has been noted
that dude is often realized with a fronted /u/, resulting in forms such as /dʉ!d/ or
/‘dy!d/. Kiesling (2004: 298) places strong emphasis on this, arguing that “dude
is almost always spoken with a fronted /u/ by the young speakers who use it, es-
pecially when it is used in a stylized manner”. While the actual frequency of this
stylized pronunciation is not accounted for, it is certainly true that the fronted
vowel is very much part of the quintessential speaker profile that is associated
with use of dude: the 1990s slacker or his 2000s counterpart, the hipster, both
imbued with a sense of cool and very self-conscious superiority. In this sense, the
phonetic variation is conceived here as a carrier of social meaning in the sense
of Eckert (2008), where a marked pronunciation functions as a way of indexing
identities and stances.
The situation for Alter is remarkably similar; a sociophonetic analysis of Alter
is provided in Souza (2013) Based on the standard pronunciation /alt#/, the vari-
ation in this case is based on voicing of the /t/ sound. The marked phonetic real-
ization of Alter is a continuum that ranges from /ald#/ to /all#/.8 Souza (forthc.)
provides an in-depth analysis of this continuum and the social meaning that is
indexed through the use of the marked forms – precisely, a ‘ghetto’ identity of
tough masculinity. This pattern has been noted by Deppermann (2007: 345), who
refers to “the tag alder with its characteristic lenization [sic] of /t/ to /d/.” Similar-
ly, Dirim and Auer (2004: 221) mention the lenition of /t/; in addition, they note a
tendency for fronting of the schwa sound, yielding approximately /$ld%/; however,
this vowel variant appears to be highly regionally specific. It is worth noting that
both Dirim and Auer and Deppermann base their descriptions on the stylized
form of the ethnolect that is strongly influenced by its representation in mass
media; as with Kiesling’s reference to the stylized usage of fronted dude, this is an
indication that these alternative phonetic realizations are ways of augmenting the
stylistic and affective potential of these vocative forms.
It has been noted that the phonetic variation found in dude is particularly in-
teresting because it is an instance of a larger, ongoing sound change pattern. Thus
fronting of /u/ is a well-established factor in most North American varieties (Labov
et al. 2006: 151–155), in particular after coronals (as is the case in dude); amongst
others, it has been implicated in the ongoing Northern California Vowel Shift.
For the German case, it can be speculated whether lenition in Alter is similarly
not an isolated event. Thus many of the phonetic features which are so indexical of
the stylized ethnolect of second and third generation immigrants and strongly as-
sociated with German rap and hip hop are in fact reminiscent of phonetic features

8. As Souza (2013) remarks, the unmarked pronunciation is often accompanied by an aspira-

tion of the /t/ sound.

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 Dude, Alter! 287

prevalent in Southern and Western German communities, e.g. in the varieties of

the Frankfurt/Mannheim area. This is the case for the lenition of plosives (/p/ →
/b/, /t/ → /d/) or the coronalization of fricative /ch/ to /sch/ – traditionally south-
western features that can also be heard in ethnolectal communities in Hamburg
and Berlin (e.g. Krämer 2009: 33–35). At least in certain communities of practice,
then, it would appear that a set of phonetic features is travelling North and East –
and the word Alter is indexical of that process. As Kiesling (2004: 298) has noted,
“while dude is not causing nor necessarily driving the sound change, it is certainly
emblematic of it and is one of the ways that the sound change has been imbued
with social meanings.” Given the medially exposed and salient status of Alter, this
conclusion can certainly be extended to the German case.
It is worth mentioning that the written realization of dude and Alter exhibits
similar patterns of variation, and that this seems to hold a similar potential for
indexing identities and stances. This is most obviously the case in computer-me-
diated communication (CMC). It is one of the central tenets of the discipline that
online discourse facilitates the use of nonstandard, more oral forms in a written
context, such as the occurrence of nonstandard spellings, the general lowering of
orthographic standards, and the use of markers such as acronyms, emoticons and
paraverbal features (Crystal 2001); it has been argued that such mediated forms
of discourse can have a catalytic function on language change in a larger sense
(Heyd 2010). In the case of dude and Alter, as they occur in online usage, it can
be argued that their CMC spelling mirrors the pronunciation patterns outlined
above; the sociolinguistic implication is similar to what Sebba has described as
“rebellious” spelling or “respellings” (Sebba 2003: 154).
For dude, the two major orthographic variants that can be found in CMC are
dewd and dood, shown in the following examples in the singular and plural forms:
(18) a. Dewd. I have to wash the dishes.
(http://www.golivewire.com/forums/peer-ysyebpn-support-a.html)
b. Good news dewds… I just put 15GBs of music on my IPod, and deleted
it off my computer.
(http://p103.ezboard.com/fcheaploungefrm7.showNextMessage?
topicID=202.topic)
c. Hey dood whats,your favorite football team?
(http://www.maybenow.com/Hey-dood-whats,your-favorite-football-
team-q24003622)
d. tgif9 doods! hey, everyone, it’s fuh-fuh-friday at last!
(http://www.scarecrowjoe.com/2009/09/tgif-doods.html)

9. ‘tgif ’ is leetspeak for “Thank God it’s Friday” (Ed.’s note).

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288 Theresa Heyd

As can be seen, the orthographic variation here again concerns the vowel quality.
While dood is strongly associated with gaming jargon,10 it can be argued that
dewd in particular is an attempt to mimic the fronted /u/ in spoken discourse.
The following excerpts from a metalinguistic discussion amongst participants of
an ESL forum shows that speakers share this perception:
(19) “I myself think informal spellings such as “dewd” for “dude” do not really
indicate [‘dju!d] but rather simple vowel fronting as [dʉ!d] or, more extremely,
as [‘dy!d].” (…) “I agree, spellings like “dewd’’ for “dude’’ and “kewl’’ for “cool’’
indicate the vowel fronting.”
(http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t10270.htm)

Apart from this primary orthographic variation, a secondary aspect is the alter-
native spelling of the plural suffix as -z, yielding forms such as dudez, dewdz and
doodz. This spelling pattern for voiced /s/ is not uncommon in North America,
e.g. in advertising, such as the Beanz meanz Heinz slogan, and more recently in
rap culture (Androutsopoulos 2006); while it is not endemic to the Internet, it has
been eagerly adopted there (e.g. in early leetspeak terminology such as warez).
For Alter, the situation is similar. The single most important orthographic
variation is the representation of the lenition of /t/ through the variant Alder. In
fact, this form is so wide-spread that it occurs freely in the available literature
on the topic (e.g. in the title of Androutsopoulos 2001). Unsurprisingly, it is also
found online, as in the following example that additionally shows this pattern in
the word gude (from gute):
(20) richtig geiler blog, ich hab jetzt voll die gude laune, alder
[A really cool blog, now I’m in a really good mood, alder]
(http://www.atomtigerblog.de/2006/05/07/gude-laune-feierei-alder/)

In addition, there are even less conventional spellings that also concern the con-
sonant cluster, in particular Allder and Aldder. In these cases of duplicated conso-
nants, it can be speculated whether the mimicking effect aims at the quality of the
consonant cluster, such as aspiration of the /t/ sound, or whether it rather tries to
imitate subtle variations in the prosody of the word, such as a lengthening of the
first syllable.
As with dude, a secondary site of variation exists in the orthography of Alter,
in this case concerning the schwa in the suffix, which can be realized as -a, yield-
ing forms such as Alda, Allda, Aldda, etc. Again, this is a pattern that is found in
many similar words in online usage: besides other address terms such as Bruda,

10. Thus the word (in its leetspeak respelling) is part of the widespread Internet meme I’m in ur
base, killing ur d00ds – see e.g. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-ur-base#.TlyVy4JhWfU.

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 Dude, Alter! 289

Schwesta, the use of forms such as oda (oder) and aba (aber) is a well-known fea-
ture of German CMC.11
In sum, a parallelism can be noted in the phonetic and orthographic realiza-
tion of dude and Alter. Both have a stylistically marked variant whose occurrence
may be part of larger ongoing sound change phenomena. In addition, this pho-
netic variation is mimicked in the orthographic reproduction of the words, with
primary variation in the reproduction of /t/ and /u/, and secondary variation con-
cerning more conventionalized CMC spelling patterns. The notion of indexical
shifts and identity management through spelling variation seems particularly in-
teresting for further research, as much of third-wave sociolinguistics has focused
on phonetic variation in spoken discourse. In this sense, the phenomena seen
here are part of the enregisterment of language use on and through the Internet
(Squires 2010).

4.4 Sociopragmatic scope: Stylization and mediatization

Throughout the discussion up to this point, one aspect of both dude and Alter
has repeatedly come up: both dude and Alter are first and foremost characterized,
perceived and describable through their sociolinguistic and pragmatic power. To
a degree, this is inherent to the category of vocative items – arguably, all words
that can be used to address and identify listeners are loaded with sociopragmatic
impetus. Yet in the case of dude and Alter, the effect goes beyond this basic “voc-
ative power”: they both are used by speakers as stylistic resources (in the sense of
Coupland 2007) for self-positioning and thus function as indexicals for different
instantiations of youth culture. In particular, both dude and Alter are found in
stylized, self-conscious usage.
As Hill (1994) has argued, the current incarnation of the word dude can be
dated at least to the 1980s; since then, it has been handed down through the de-
cades from youth subculture to youth subculture. Thus dude moved from the
1980s surfer and skater culture, still mostly associated with west coast usage, to
the ubiquitous 1990s American figure of the slacker, and finally on to the 2000s
hipster movement. Despite their differences, these groups share some similari-
ties – a certain nonconformist and alternative stance, an antimaterialistic attitude

11. Another variant that can be found for the schwa suffix is -ä, as in the following example:
Freitag wird so endz geil Aldä! [Friday is going to be so rad Aldä!]
(http://www.spin.de/hp/Nordwind../blog/id/1641621)
It appears that this usage mimics the pronunciation as /$ld%/, noted above in the quote from
Dirim and Auer.

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290 Theresa Heyd

that is nevertheless bolstered by identification through brand names and shop-

ping decisions, and a profound and self-conscious irony.
For Alter, the situation appears somewhat less straightforward. As outlined in
Section 2, Alter was a relative generic vocative used by young people especially in
southern varieties of German until the 1990s. Since then, it has become marked –
and, in fact, stereotyped – as an ethnolectal feature. The ethnicity in question is
primarily that of second and third generation Turkish immigrant youth; however,
usage of Alter has spread out, in a process of ethnolectal diffusion, to virtually
all diasporic immigrant groups present in Germany – speakers of Arabic, young
people from the Mediterranean and the Balkan countries, and even to the grow-
ing group of Russian-German resettlers (see Naumova 2002: Chapter 4). Based
on this in-group anchoring and the societal attributes it is associated with, Alter
stands out as a term imbued with notions of toughness and being street smart
among a considerable group of young people (see in particular the ethnogra-
phic evidence in Souza 2013). In turn, it has even become an instance of crossing
(Rampton 1995): thus vocative Alter is nowadays widely used by young people of
non-immigrant background to adopt a certain stance. This is poignantly the case
in the Austrian ‘Krocha’ movement (Hitzler 2009), a predominantly white (sub-)
urban subculture that has been compared to British ‘chavs’, for whom the lavish
use of vocative Oida has become emblematic.
This stylization, and appropriation as a sociopragmatic commodity, is not so
surprising if we consider the use of dude and Alter in mass media and popu-
lar culture. Both words have received considerable attention in formats such as
movies and comedy shows. Kiesling (2004: 288–289) evokes films such as Fast
Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and
describes their protagonists as quintessential dude users. Other movies in which
the characters make heavy use of the word dude include American Pie (1999) and
its sequels, the eponymous Dude, Where’s My Car (2000), as well as the Harold
and Kumar series (2004/2008). A special case is The Big Lebowski (1998), whose
protagonist goes by the moniker “the dude” and is addressed by vocative dude
throughout the movie; while the film gained incredible popularity and continues
to be referenced in quotes and allusions, dude here was primarily realized as a
proper name.
For Alter, reproduction through the media has especially been noted in the
form of comedy shows that satirize the language use and lifestyle associated with
young urban men with a migrant background. The most popular of these emerged
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, namely Erkan & Stefan, the (again, eponymous)
duo Dragan & Alder developed by the comedy act Mundstuhl, and the comedian
Kaya Yanar (see Androutsopoulos 2001: 9f.; Deppermann 2007 for overviews).

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 Dude, Alter! 291

All of these rely on the heavy stylization of perceived ethnolectal features, lavish
use of vocative Alter being one of them.
These strong stylization effects for both dude and Alter point to a larger pat-
tern in their usage: the words have become linguistic stereotypes that are easily
recognizable both for active users and non-users of the items. Using dude or Alter
is a very clear way of discursively positioning oneself; ascribing usage of these
words to someone else is a very effective way of assigning them a specific demo-
graphic and sociocultural position.
In sum, despite the obviously distinct identities that dude and Alter index, it
can be argued that both have an underlying shared basis, namely in the stance
that these identities express – between the users of the words, but also towards the
society at large.12 A noted before, Kiesling (2004) has described the stance under-
lying dude as “cool solidarity”, implying a sense of intimacy and attachment which
is, at the same time, somewhat subdued and no too overly enthusiastic. It is easy
to see how this description can also extend to the speakers whose identities are
indexed by Alter: the communities described above are based on a form of ‘tough
camaraderie’, a sense of belonging and bonding that must nevertheless exude
street smarts and toughness. In fact, it may even be speculated that the extensive
use of dude and Alter can be interpreted as a wider response against the careerism
and meritocracy that is dominating in post-industrial America and Germany. In
this sense, both vocatives signal a tacit refusal to be a part of the career-driven,
well-groomed and well-spoken future workforce. Based on this descriptive angle,
the sociopragmatic impetus of dude and Alter may in fact be surprisingly simi-
lar – despite their obvious differences in social meaning on the surface.

5. Discussion

This cross-linguistic comparison of dude and Alter has tried to uncover some of
the relevant properties of these American English and German vocatives. It has
highlighted some differences in origin and usage, but has in particular focused
on a number of striking similarities between dude and Alter on many linguistic
levels, from phonological issues to aspects of sociolinguistic stylization. While it
has become clear that dude and Alter are not formally or functionally equivalent –
this is first and foremost due to the very different identities associated with usage
of the words in American and German societies – it is nevertheless remarkable

12. In this sense, the notion of ‘stance’ is distinguished here from ‘identity’ in that stances are
a way of performatively positioning, and communicating, identity towards others; see Jaffe
(2009: 6–7) for a discussion of the term.

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292 Theresa Heyd

that so many parallel characteristics can be identified. This begs the question what
gives rise to these similarities. Are they coincidental and merely artificially high-
lighted through the contrastive perspective of cross-linguistic analysis? Are they
inherent to the syntactic category of vocatives in general, and might be extended
to other vocative forms? Or are there more fundamental underlying mechanisms
that can be identified?
A first explanatory approach can be safely rejected, namely the suspicion that
the similarities described here are purely superficial and only artificially fore-
grounded through the analytical lens used for this study. Since the aspects of dude
and Alter analyzed here cover both formal and functional, both microlinguistic
(e.g. phonological) and macrolinguistic (e.g. sociopragmatic scope) features, and
since many of these findings have been mentioned in the literature before, it can
safely be assumed that there is indeed a powerful and somewhat robust parallel-
ism between dude an Alter.
A second interpretation of the findings presented here might be that the sim-
ilarities found in dude and Alter are, quite simply, indicative of vocative use in
general in modern-day American English and German. This is certainly true at
least for the functional aspects analyzed here, and to a degree, some of the criteria
identified here may be extendable to other vocative forms in the two languages.
For example, the German vocative Digger (derived from the nominalization Dicker
meaning ‘fatty’) is often mentioned as functionally similar or even equivalent to
Alter, and in fact has a tendency to co-occur with Alter, as in this example:
(21) Digger, nerv‘ nich ab, Alder!
[Digger, don’t get on my nerves, Alder]
(http://www.kampfkunst-board.info/forum/f80/
digger-nerv-nich-ab-alder-53277/)

Other items that might be included in such a paradigm of German informal voc-
atives include Keule, Atze (both of them Berlin regionalisms), Kollege, Kumpel or
Junge. Similarly, American English vocatives that share some of the patterns of
dude include bro, buddy, homie, dawg or nigga (the latter two often seen as part
of AAVE as an ethnolinguistic repertoire). As emphasized in the introduction,
vocatives are by their very nature loaded with social and interactional impetus,
and this is the case both for stylistically unmarked forms such as man or Mann
and for extremely recent, specific or expressive vocative forms. A larger compar-
ative study would have to determine whether more vocatives apart from dude
and Alter display specific features such as semantic bleaching, phonological and
orthographic variation, and a loss of vocative reference in favor of a general dis-
course marker quality.

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 Dude, Alter! 293

Regardless of the exact scope of similarities in American English and German

vocatives beyond dude and Alter, it might be speculated whether these similar-
ities could be due to a larger underlying linguistic mechanism; thus Fleischman
and Yaguello (2004), in a cross-linguistic comparison of discourse markers such
as English like and French genre, have suggested a language change process of
‘pragmaticalization’. For the cross-linguistic analysis presented here, it may ten-
tatively be concluded that the similarities found here are partly structural, partly
coincidental. What should have become patently clear, however, is that vocatives
deserve more attention in linguistic and pragmatic analyses: not only are they
loaded with interpersonal and societal meanings, but their syntactically marked
status also makes them easily analyzable. It is to be hoped, then, that vocatives will
eventually attract as much interest as discourse markers have in the past; this pa-
per should have shown that a cross-linguistic approach can contribute insightful
and innovative angles to the debate.

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diffusion of ethnolectal patterns in contemporary German. LAUD Linguistic Agency A522,
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About the author

Theresa Heyd is a researcher at the English Department of Freiburg University. She holds a
Ph.D. from Düsseldorf University; her doctoral dissertation on the genre ecology of email
hoaxes was published with Benjamins (2008). Her current work is focused on the sociolinguis-
tics of globalization and the emergence of globalized vernaculars under the conditions of late
modernity. She has published on various aspects of mediated discourse, including the pragmat-
ics of CMC, digital genre theory, and stylized language use in mediated contexts.

Author’s address
Theresa Heyd
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
English Department
Rempartstraße 15
D-79085 Freiburg
Germany
theresa.heyd@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved