“What’s up, bro?” : A synchronic corpus study on the use of bro in TV shows

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to analyze the synchronic variation in usage of the word bro in English speaking TV shows that aired 2017, by extracting data from The TV Corpus. In today’s society bro is becoming more and more frequent in use and the increase seems to be partly due to the high level of nuance the word has. It can be used in several situations. This is shown in the results where the categories of gender, age, race/ethnicity, relationship and context are presented. Combined, the examined material shows that the most common situation for the usage of bro is a white adult male saying it to his white adult male friend in a work-related context. This suggests a trend where bro has developed from only meaning brother to also mean friend or more specifically, male friend, nowadays. This kind of development is not unusual for clipped words, that is, shortened words that retain a meaning similar to the original word.  The results of this study suggest that bro is becoming more integrated into the language and that bro seems to be a word tied to a masculine stereotype. However, further studies are needed to determine all the nuances of the word bro and how it will continue to evolve in the future.