Struggling to navigate linguistic formality


NO, NOT that TV. I'm writing from Mexico, and for the last two days have been working mostly in a language I speak tolerably well, Spanish. But one thing keeps pestering me: whether to use or usted to address Mexicans at the conferences I'm taking part in. Linguists call it the T-V distinction, named after the French tu and vous.

Most European languages, and many others, have a T-V distinction. The textbooks always give the same advice: the T pronoun is used for friends, family, children and generally intimate situations. V is for elders, to show respect, for strangers, at work, etc.

The problem is that this is far too simple. Languages, social groups, generations and individuals differ on when to use T and when to use V. I haven't been to Mexico in a long time; I seemed to remember using usted most of the time last time I was here. But at our Economist conference, with ministers, congressmen and business leaders chit-chatting with one another, I heard native speakers using with each other, even on the stage in a semi-formal interview context. I started following suit, -ing more and more people until I was doing it to a former ambassador near his 80s in appearance. We had a friendly rapport, but I was nagged with the thought that I had gone too far. I didn't even notice what he called me, but most conference-goers did me. The hotel staff unfailingly called me usted.

The different Spanish-speaking countries differ in -prevalence. I have a feeling that it's more about age than anything else in Spain, and I remember the southern-cone countries as pretty informal. (The local T form is vos, not .) Younger people more often. Brazil has a V form, o senhor, but almost no one uses it. I was corrected with a smile almost every time I tried it, until I stopped. (Portugal has a three-level system: tu, você and o senhor.) In contrast to Brazil, in Germany, the V-form, Sie, is almost mandatory between all adults who are not friends. I distinctly remember feeling insulted, during my student days, when I straggled from my couchette to the cafe car on an overnight train (leaving Oktoberfest, so you can imagine the state I was in). The cafe-car man addressed me with an icy "Was willst du?", "what do you want?". I was old enough to expect Sie, I thought, even if I did look like I had slept in the gutter the night before.

Danes have all but abandoned their V-form, De, as have Swedes. I have only used De once in Danish, with the former prime minister and current secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen (interviewed on camera, in English, here). The breakdown of the old distinction is a point of pride in these egalitarian societies. But De is not entirely dead; my wife says she will use it in very specific situations, mainly with much older Danes whom she expects to be conservative.

And then there's the wrinkle of format: French tu is near universal on Twitter, even among strangers. A magazine editor, Laurent Joffrin, rebuked another Twitterer with a frosty "Who told you you could tutoyer me?", whereupon other French Twitterers attacked him for his ignorance and condescension. Here we see a nicely typical overlap of social and linguistic conservatism; Mr Joffrin, though on the political left, is a critic of the coarsening effect of short-form media like Twitter: "It's an appalling culture."

English shed its T-form, in a development that is the mirror-image of modern Denmark's. Thou was robust in Elizabethan times. (A few Shakespeare plot points turn on the thou-you distinction.). But thou gradually died out as you filtered down the classes, with the idea that everyone deserved the respect implied by you. Overuse of you would have irritated many other conservatives during the long transition, as any large-scale language change does. Quakers resisted for a long time: thou implied intimacy and solidarity and lack of formality. You-ing everyone was for social climbers. God, in particular, was to be addressed with thou, as befits the most intimate possible relationship.

I'm still in Mexico for a couple of days. Native-speakers of Spanish, ayuden a un amigo: what are your rules for and usted these days? I have another conference to go, and don't want to offend, nor do I want to seem stiff and formal. And speakers of other languages, what's the status of T-V in your language? How is it changing? Did I get any of the above wrong?

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