A pragmatic analysis of the addressing patterns and functions of the Saudi masculine vocative yakhy

Talal Mutlaq Alharbi
Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University

Previous work has shown that masculine vocatives are increasingly used beyond their typical context of designating a masculine addressee across a range of languages. Building on this scholarship, this study investigates the Saudi Arabic vocative yakhy (‘my brother’), drawing on a self-report survey and a corpus of X.com (formerly Twitter) posts. The findings reveal that yakhy exhibits usage patterns comparable to those of several vocatives in other languages. It is used to address both men and women and serves various interactional functions. Moreover, yakhy displays rich stance-taking and indexical properties, making it a useful resource for navigating interactional and cultural contexts. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of yakhy and offer broader insights into the cross-linguistic patterning and development of masculine vocatives.

Publication history

Date received: 22 August 2024

Date accepted: 7 January 2026

Published online: 18 August 2026

Table of contents

Masculine vocatives constitute a curious case across languages. These are “nominal vocatives that have been traditionally associated with male speakers and addressees” (Urichuk and Loureiro-Rodríguez 2019, 355). Research has shown that such vocatives are prone to developing flexible addressing patterns and wide-ranging interactional functions that go beyond their typical function of designating a masculine addressee, drawing attention to similar linguistic development patterns across languages (e.g., Heyd 2014).

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