hey man
Guest (Pub Lunch I assume),
What dream did I ruin?
I try to use slang sparingly, but you know how it is, it just slips out sometimes. I will have to say, it seems to me that Americans, even though we're attributed with using to much slang, bad grammer, etc, have better grammer and word usage (in a by-the-book, what-my-teacher-taught-me, prescriptivist) way, than the average British person. *I don't mean to offend anybody* I'm a bit of BBC addict, so I can't help but notice. Yeah, the posh, RP speakers are ultra correct, but where the Geordies or the Bronte country people learned to form a sentence I'll never know. That isn't to say that I don't think they know the rules, or that we know them better, I'm just commenting on everyday, casual speech patterns.
<<have better grammer and word usage>>
Yep, sure you do...
hey every body !!
All in all, you mean we can use :
"guy and man " for male .... "dude, mate, man " for girls, right ?!
and what about buddy and pal ?( hey buddy... hey pal)
who can use them and actually for who ?!(men for men, men for women, women for women, women for men)
I really get confused , help me please.
"Dude" really is a male. When females use it, they are doing so only to be and sound like us.
Don't ever call a girl that you know and especially one that you don't know a "Dude". They won't like it [normally]
"Guy" neither, although you can refer to a group of girls as "guys" as a generic term (in general)
Hey man......the only people who use this expression here in the UK are those from the Caribbean community, who mostly live in the metropolitan areas - especially London, Birmingham/West Midlands and Manchester. Very few white people use it (apart from Americans visiting this country) and I can't remember hearing any other ethnic groups use it. I know from watching American reality TV shows that it's widely used in the USA - by all communities as far as I could tell.
We've done the "mate" thing in this forum before - it's used a great deal in the UK but mostly between males, and not necessarily between males who know each other....strangers address each other that way. When I was with a mate from uni (male) in Epsom, near London, one day, we went into Dixons (sells all sorts of electrical stuff etc) when the young male assistant said to this elderly man (about 70): "Can I help you, mate?" The old bloke said: "Do we know each other?" Young lad, looking puzzled: "No, mate!" Old man: "Then why call me your mate then?" Young lad looked dumbstruck. Old man: "You need to learn some respect, young man!" With that the old man turned round and strolled out of the shop without buying what he went in for.
The term mate is normally seen as a friendly male to male thing, but it seems it doesn't please everybody, and it may well be a generational thing as well. And Epsom is rather staid and just a wee bit posh, to say the least.
As for females using "mate" when addressing males or even other females, it's not a case of a generational thing, much more of an environmental/social one really. When females use the word they normally use it in a perjorative way.
Dude isn't part of Britspeak in any great way at all. It's seen as very much part of Americanspeak.
>>Guest (Pub Lunch I assume),
What dream did I ruin?
I try to use slang sparingly, but you know how it is, it just slips out sometimes. I will have to say, it seems to me that Americans, even though we're attributed with using to much slang, bad grammer, etc, have better grammer and word usage (in a by-the-book, what-my-teacher-taught-me, prescriptivist) way, than the average British person. *I don't mean to offend anybody* I'm a bit of BBC addict, so I can't help but notice. Yeah, the posh, RP speakers are ultra correct, but where the Geordies or the Bronte country people learned to form a sentence I'll never know. That isn't to say that I don't think they know the rules, or that we know them better, I'm just commenting on everyday, casual speech patterns.<<
The reason for this is not that the average American cares about prescriptivism at all more than the average Briton, but rather that the General American standard is a different kind of standard from Received Pronunciation. The matter is that GA was based off the dialects of the Lower Midwest as they existed shortly prior to WW2, and it happens due to the settlement patterns within the US combined with said settlement happening in the very recent past that a lot of dialects in the US are quite close to the dialects GA was based off of to begin with. Also, the dialects from which GA originated are primarily descended from the speech of southeastern England just prior to the rise of non-rhoticism, making them quite standard to begin with as English dialects go. Furthermore, they were quite phonologically conservative, having really only significantly deviated from such with the merger of many vowels in particular positions (or in the case of /ɑː/ and /ɒ/, generally), the weakening and commonplace loss of phonemic vowel length, and the commonplace loss of the distinction between /w/ and /ʍ/. Most more progressive sound changes in relatively GA-like dialects seem to be quite new, with them being very conservative not that long in the past. Hence, there is no real special reason why most people in the US speak far more standardly than most Britons, as it is their own native dialects which are quite standard to begin with without any real standardizing influence being present on a large scale in much of English-speaking North America.
Here in southeastern Wisconsin, "hey man" is really only used by the AAVE-speaking population and is really not current in the dialect here, and "dude" is not heard at all (and comes off as sounding very Californian overall); the main term of that sort which is used here is "guy", which is male in gender when singular but genderless when plural (as are other forms derived from or incorporating "guys").
I sometimes say "hey man" but a vast majority of the time I say "hey dude." I can't remember, but I believe I've been saying that since before I lived in California.
I believe that "dude" is widespread throughout the United States.
What do females use then?
It'd be darn good if they at least use hey.... like how I use wai all my life.
I've also heard an Canadian who calls me dude all the time. How is it?
There are some girls who say "hey man". They're usually kind of tomboyish in my experience, though.
<<,What do females use then?>>
Females usually say "Hey Girl" or "Hey Girlfriend"
sometime you'll hear "sister/sista"
...sometimes even "hey Woman!" if the female is bold or brash enough
"Man" isn't used exclusively by males, but culturally it's used a lot more by men than by women, at least in California and the Mid-western part of the US. I have to respectfully disagree with Lo... it sounds odd to hear a girl or woman say "man" or "dude" to another female. Like it or not, there *are* words for men and words for women. If you doubt that, refer to a guy as a "chick" and he'll probably wonder if you were addressing him or a woman standing next to him. Would a British speaker of English refer to his girlfriend as a "bloke"? In a similar way, a "man" is a man after all, so saying "hey man" to a woman is kind of silly. In fact, in many parts of the US, if you say, "hey you guys" to a group of women, they will say you're being sexist. Feminists will not tolerate being called "you guys".
Like Lo, I would also tell a woman she has a pretty haircut, or a pretty dress, but I wouldn't say that to a man.... culturally we don't normally refer to men as pretty.
I don't think this makes us sexist or homophobic.... those accusations are thrown around way too much.
This is a great topic for discussion because unwritten rules surrounding idiomatic expressions can be very abstract.