Pronominal variation in interaction: the interactional function of <i>man</i> and <i>bro</i>

Abstract Recent work in variationist sociolinguistics has argued for greater interactional accountability in analyses of linguistic variation. The present article contributes to this line of inquiry by exploring the interactional conditioning of a relatively new pronoun – man – in two datasets: (i) a corpus of speech and social media data from young people in East London recorded in 2016/17 and (ii) a more recent social media corpus of fifty English-language TikTok videos and their comments. Analyses reveal that man is principally used as a third-person singular pronoun ( man said ‘one two five’ ) and less often as a first-person singular pronoun ( man’s doing that voice recording thing ) contra to previous findings. I argue that third-person singular man is most commonly used in so-called moments of ‘byplay’ in which the interlocutor is temporarily excluded from the discourse. In this context, man draws attention to the actions or comments of an interlocutor, typically for ridicule or emphasis. I then briefly consider the relationship of man to the pronominal use of bro ( bro said ‘he’s going to heaven’ ) before speculating that the interactional potentials of man/bro could, potentially, promote their diffusion beyond the communities in which they first emerged.