Address Terms of Brotherhood in the Indian Online Gaming Community

ABSTRACT Indian gamers are part of the Indian society as well as a globalised gaming community. To navigate this cultural dissonance, they can use address terms to reflect and create their double or divided identities. This article investigates forms and functions of kinship terms that are connected to the concept of brother ‘male sibling’, for example, bro and bhai , in a corpus of Indian YouTube comments surrounding gaming. The terms are mostly used at the beginning of a turn and mainly with a relational function. A generalised linear model that predicts the address term's language of origin (English or Hindi) finds form, turn position and communicative function to be significant factors for preferring one over the other. However, overall, English‐ and Hindi‐originating address terms behave similarly, indicating a merging of the IndE‐speaking and the gaming community.