The social conditioning of lexical items for man in British English: The demise of man and the rise of guy

This study uses corpus-based variationist quantitative methods to probe the semantic field of male adult noun referents in British English from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. Results indicate that guy has surpassed man as the most frequently used noun to refer to male individuals in the third person, mirroring developments observed in North America. Characteristically British nouns for male adults, such as bloke and fella, undergo gradual replacement by a perceptually North American variant, suggesting the possible influence of North American English in Britain. The innovative pronominal use of man in southern British English is also hypothesised as a possible impetus, with the innovative pronominal use encroaching on the nominal usage. Real-time data confirms most predictions made based on the apparent-time construct. Age, gender, and socioeconomic status are found to influence lexical choices, with young middle-class men favouring guy the most. This study adds to the growing body of literature that shows lexis can be socially conditioned, confirms the validity of apparent-time analysis, and highlights recent but rapid changes in the semantic field of “man” in British English.