Dude!

(What’s up with that word?)

Dude, I’m doing some research.
What on, dude?
“Dude.”
Dude?
“Dude”—as in, where did the word “dude” come from? Who uses it? When and how do they use it?
Dude!

Scott F. Kiesling, a professor in Pitt’s Department of Linguistics, investigated the origins and usage of the “D” word and published his findings in “Dude,” an article in the linguistics journal American Speech (Duke University Press, Fall 2004).

A sociolinguist specializing in language and gender, Kiesling often heard “dude” spoken by the fraternity members whose conversations he tape recorded while gathering data for his Ph.D. dissertation, “Language, Gender, and Power in Fraternity Men’s Discourse.”

Having been a fraternity member as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Kiesling was able to gain access to another chapter of the same national fraternity to conduct his research. Throughout 1993, he recorded the young men’s conversations.

“At the time I was doing it, there was no work about language and gender in terms of how men use language to be masculine,” says Kiesling, who has spent the last decade working with the data he gathered at the fraternity.

In researching the term “dude” specifically, Kiesling got help from students in the Pitt courses he teaches on sociolinguistics and on language and gender.

Exploring “dude” would be a perfect exercise for his students, Kiesling thought, because they would be familiar with the term, they could hear it in conversations with their peers, and they could draw conclusions about it.

Kiesling asked his students to listen for “dude” and, whenever they heard it, to write down who said it, something about the person who said it, something about the person being addressed, what actually was meant by the term, and where in the sentence “dude” was used.

After putting the gathered data together on a spreadsheet, Kiesling asked students for analysis, instructing them to focus on power and solidarity and other patterns they found.

In his article, Kiesling notes that the survey confirmed that while “dude” is mainly used by males under age 30, women use it, too. But just as men tend to use the term only when addressing other men, women similarly limit their use of “dude” to other women—suggesting that “dude” denotes solidarity among users.

As a teenager in the 1980s, Kiesling used “dude” in addressing his own peers. According to Kiesling, the use of “dude” grew in popularity during that decade among young men emulating the laid-back demeanor and “dude”-laden speech of characters in such films as 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

In his American Speech article, Kiesling wrote, “The term is used mainly in situations in which a speaker takes a stance of solidarity or camaraderie, but crucially in a nonchalant, not-too-enthusiastic manner.” The term signifies rebelliousness or membership in such countercultural groups as hippies, surfers, and druggies.

The stereotypic user of “dude” is a young White man, “which is interesting because of where the term comes from,” Kiesling says. “The story is that there were these groups, urban Mexican Americans pachuchos and African American zoot-suiters, known for being well dressed, who would call each other ‘dude.’ That transferred over to hippies, surfers—California types—and it seems to have come out of that into the mainstream.”

Kiesling found that “dude” appears overwhelmingly either at the beginning or end of a sentence or greeting.

He identified five “interactional functions” for dude: marking off one segment of discourse from another, exclamation, mitigating a confrontational stance, marking affiliation and connection, and signaling agreement. He points out that these functions are not mutually exclusive and that “dude” can perform more than one function in a single utterance or can be left ambiguous.
An earlier article by another scholar had projected that “dude” would lose meaning and drop out of everyday speech—but that’s not what Kiesling found.

“You can’t put it anywhere you want, but it is much freer than what you [typically would] use for an address term,” he says. “You put it in when you don’t need an address term, when it’s clear who you’re talking to. You put it in when you’re talking to a whole bunch of people. It’s doing a lot of work with intonation to see how you’re relating to somebody.”

Kiesling suggests that as “dude” users get older, they will retain it as a term they can pull out and use when needed.

The Pitt professor is curious to see how other linguists will react to his “Dude” article. He also would like to see students in other parts of the country replicate the project his classes did in order to see whether people use “dude” differently across the United States.

“Also, on the question of ethnicity, I’d like to see whether there is a difference there, and people who are older, whether there is a kind of ‘age grading’—that is, when you change your talk as you get older. And, I’d like to see if there’s any reaction from the general public.” • Patricia Lomando White