"Dudes" vs "bros": How Americans refer to their friends

Do you call your male friends "dude?" How about "bro" or "buddy" or "pal?"

Your answer may be an indication of where you live, according to some Twitter-derived data.

Forensic linguist Jack Grieve examined billions of tweets to analyze the geography of language to find out where certain monikers - dude, bro, buddy, pal and fella - were most common. The results were published on Quartz in the form of an interactive map.

It is clear to see that "dude" takes the cake, especially in the Southwest.

To create the maps, Grieve first looked for occurrences of these words in the dataset, according to Quartz. After identifying the word uses and their locations, he used hot-spot testing to uncovers geographic trends by grouping together nearby areas with like results.

One thing to note though is the word "man" is not included in the data collection. It was determined that it couldn't be "meaningfully included because of its widespread use in other contexts."

Quartz also states the the words on the map on mostly used by white men, "The fact that there are so few useful and innocent vocatives for women and people of color indicates biases both in our data and in the English language itself."