2801: Bro-Noun Aug 21, 2024

The term ‘bro’ has evolved from its traditional role as a vocative expression—typically used to address someone in a familiar or informal way—into basically a pronoun. Historically, ‘bro’ was primarily employed as an exclamation or a term of endearment among friends, akin to saying ‘dude’ or ‘buddy’. Yet, it is now common to hear phrases like, "if bro thinks he can do that, he’s in for a surprise", where ‘bro’ functions as a stand-in for an unspecified person, reflecting a more pronoun-like usage. This may have first began by simply dropping the determiner (e.g. instead of “my bro” or “this bro”) which can also be with ‘dude’ in some cases, so the distinction to look out for in coming years, assuming this persists, is how generally the term ‘bro’ can be applied especially mid sentence. After all, the only syntactic distinction between a noun and a proper noun, which includes pronouns, is whether it is able to take a determiner.

Pronouns are considered a closed lexical class (i.e. part of speech), meaning it is exceedingly rare to see a new word with that type of syntactic function. When it does happen, it is usually from an external need, like the relatively new use of the pronoun “you guys”—and other second person plurals like y’all, yous, and yinz—so in this case perhaps the need in question was for an third person pronoun with an informal register, though it just as well might have been a random occurrence.