Karly
There are few things that make me appreciate the English language quite like meeting a German speaker whose relationship to me falls into the terrifying linguistic category of “I have absolutely no idea whether I’m supposed to call you du or Sie.” English, for all its many crimes, has granted me one extraordinary mercy: I can address my best friend, my university professor, a complete stranger and the King with exactly the same second-person pronoun and leave the rest of the sentence to deal with the social consequences.
German does not afford me this luxury, and neither, for that matter, do French, Italian or Spanish, which means that learning the languages I speak has repeatedly required me to answer a question I would really rather leave unanswered: exactly what is my relationship to the person standing in front of me? It is genuinely comforting to know that if I ever meet Meryl Streep, an event for which I would otherwise be profoundly linguistically and emotionally unprepared, at least I will never have to stand there wondering whether Meryl and I are on formal or informal “you” terms.
On paper, the distinction is easy enough. German has du and Sie, French has tu and vous, Italian has tu and Lei, and Spanish has tú and usted, although anyone familiar with the enormous geographical variation of Spanish will already be preparing an email informing me that I have criminally neglected vos, vosotros and approximately half a continent. Broadly speaking, one form is associated with familiarity and the other with some combination of formality, politeness and social distance, and this is usually introduced to language learners as a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction until you meet an actual person and discover that the tidy little table from your textbook has abandoned you.
You don’t interact with “FORMAL SINGULAR”; you interact with a 43-year-old colleague of your friend who has introduced herself by her first name but is technically senior to you, or a lecturer who is friendly but still very much your lecturer, or somebody approximately your age in a professional setting where everyone else appears to know a set of rules nobody thought to explain to you. Suddenly, you have to calculate age, status, familiarity, context, regional convention, professional hierarchy and whatever mysterious interpersonal vibe is currently taking place before selecting what is, grammatically speaking, a pronoun.
This is the point at which multilingualism occasionally stops making me feel sophisticated and instead leaves me constructing increasingly elaborate sentences designed specifically to avoid addressing the other person at all. There is nothing quite like possessing several years of formal language education and using all of it to perform grammatical parkour around the word “you” because committing to a pronoun suddenly feels like making an unsolicited declaration about the nature of your relationship.
The distinction linguists often use to describe this is the T/V distinction, named after the Latin pronouns tu and vos. In very broad terms, T forms are associated with familiarity, intimacy or solidarity, while V forms are associated with politeness, distance or deference, although the exact meanings vary enormously between languages, communities and periods of history, which is where a grammatical distinction that looks wonderfully manageable in a textbook begins acquiring all the inconvenient messiness of actual human relationships.
Calling someone du rather than Sie, for example, can say considerably more than “you.” It can suggest that we’re friends, that we’re peers, that I consider us sufficiently familiar, that I’m older or socially entitled enough to establish informality, or simply that the particular community we’re in defaults to du, while using Sie can signal respect, distance, professionalism or unfamiliarity. In the wrong context, however, formality can also create distance where none was intended, and nothing makes a person feel youthful quite like accidentally addressing them with the linguistic equivalent of “dear respected elder.”
The problem is that these meanings aren’t fixed because pronouns don’t carry social relationships around inside them like dictionary definitions. Their meaning emerges from conventions shared by particular communities, which is why the supposedly equivalent distinction behaves differently across German, French, Italian and Spanish, and differently again across regions, generations and social groups within each language, so learning that vous is formal and tu is informal is only the beginning; the considerably harder part is learning when actual French speakers think formality is required.
This is also why translating these forms can become such a nuisance. If two characters spend half a novel addressing each other formally and finally switch to the familiar pronoun after becoming closer, the change may represent an important development in their relationship, but an English translator can’t simply switch from formal “you” to informal “you” because, inconveniently, they are both “you.” Something has happened socially in the source text that English has no direct grammatical mechanism for reproducing, so the translator may have to move that intimacy somewhere else through first names, tone, vocabulary or some other change in how the characters address one another.
German makes the negotiation particularly visible because speakers can actually discuss whether they should change systems. Sollen wir uns duzen?, essentially “shall we use du with each other?”, is a wonderfully explicit little sentence because what’s being negotiated isn’t merely vocabulary: two people are acknowledging that the social relationship between them can now be represented differently in language, and German even gives us verbs for the two states, duzen for addressing someone with du and siezen for addressing someone with Sie.
I find this both linguistically delightful and personally horrifying because there is something beautiful about a language making social distance so visible that two people can effectively agree to reduce it, but there is also something wonderfully freeing about English allowing me to become closer to somebody without holding a tiny grammatical ceremony first. We can move from strangers to acquaintances to friends while “you” sits peacefully in the sentence, completely indifferent to developments, and if Meryl Streep and I happen to become best friends after our hypothetical meeting, our pronouns will require absolutely no administrative updates.
English speakers shouldn’t become too smug about this because English hasn’t actually abolished politeness or social hierarchy. We still have an enormous number of ways to communicate both, but we’ve redistributed the work across other parts of the language, meaning that “Give me that,” “Could you give me that?”, “Would you mind passing me that?” and “I was wondering if you could possibly pass me that” may all be attempts to obtain the same object while creating very different interpersonal effects.
Forms of address do plenty of work too. Whether I call somebody Sarah, Ms Smith, Dr Smith, Professor Smith or simply avoid naming them for three years because they signed one email “Sarah” and I’m still not entirely convinced that constituted permission tells us that English hasn’t escaped the problem of negotiating social relationships through language. We’ve simply removed one particularly unavoidable decision from the pronoun system and allowed ourselves to agonise over email salutations, modal verbs, hedging and whether signing off with “Best” suddenly makes us sound furious instead.
There is also the small historical inconvenience that English used to participate much more obviously in this game. Earlier stages of English distinguished forms including thou/thee and ye/you, with differences involving number and, over time, social meaning, and the history is rather more complicated than the modern assumption that thou was simply an old-fashioned formal version of you. In fact, thou became associated with singular familiarity while you could carry plural and polite or deferential meanings, producing precisely the sort of socially loaded choice that modern English speakers now encounter when learning languages with T/V systems.
Eventually, you expanded while thou retreated from most mainstream varieties, leaving modern standard English with a beautifully indiscriminate second-person pronoun. In a sense, rather than eliminating the formal form, English generalised the form historically associated with polite or plural address until everybody received it, which means I can now say “you” to my mother, my best friend, somebody selling me a sandwich, Meryl Streep and King Charles without the pronoun itself providing much useful information about how I feel about any of them.
Of course, this creates problems of its own because English speakers occasionally seem offended by the fact that “you” refuses to tell us how many people we’re addressing, which is presumably why varieties of English have spent so much creative energy producing you guys, you lot, y’all, youse and other ways of rebuilding distinctions standard English has cheerfully discarded. Languages have an irritating habit of finding new problems as soon as they solve old ones, and English apparently decided that once we no longer needed to worry about whether we were sufficiently intimate with someone to thou them, we could redirect that energy towards clarifying whether “you” means one person or seventeen.
What fascinates me most about honorifics and address systems, though, is the extent to which they expose something we usually allow language to hide: every conversation takes place inside a social relationship. We’re constantly making tiny decisions about distance, intimacy, authority, politeness and belonging, even in English, but languages with formal and familiar second-person forms force speakers to encode some of those decisions in places where they become impossible to ignore.
The choice becomes particularly meaningful because it can change. A sudden tu where vous was expected, or du after a long period of Sie, can mark affection, solidarity, deliberate disrespect or a new degree of closeness depending on who says it and why, while the reverse movement can be even more striking because returning to the formal form after previously using the familiar one can create distance with extraordinary efficiency. A grammatical choice that once said “we’re close” has effectively been withdrawn, which is an impressive amount of interpersonal devastation for a pronoun to accomplish.
This is where the textbook labels “formal” and “informal” start to feel woefully inadequate because what these pronouns can encode isn’t simply politeness but social positioning. Speakers are constantly interpreting what a choice means in a particular interaction, whether somebody is being warm, respectful, cold, presumptuous, old-fashioned, professional or intentionally distant, and the pronoun itself may be tiny while the social information surrounding it is enormous.
Perhaps that’s why I find these systems so fascinating despite complaining about them whenever I actually have to use one. There is something almost absurdly intimate about a language requiring you to decide, again and again, what kind of relationship you have with another person before you can perform the extremely basic grammatical task of referring to them, and something equally fascinating about the moment when that decision changes, because pronouns don’t simply reflect relationships; sometimes they actively negotiate them.
Still, after years of tu, vous, du, Sie, tu, Lei, tú and usted, I remain profoundly grateful whenever I return to English and discover that the person in front of me is simply “you.” I may still have to work out whether to call them by their first name, whether “Hi” is too casual, whether “Dear” sounds bizarre, whether I’ve used too many exclamation marks and whether “Kind regards” makes me sound like I’m terminating a business relationship, but at least the pronoun has had the decency to stay out of it. Most comforting of all, should I ever find myself face-to-face with Meryl Streep, there will be no frantic calculation of age, status, familiarity or whether being Meryl Streep necessitates an entirely new level of grammatical deference, because English has already made the decision for me, and I can devote my remaining cognitive resources to the rather more pressing matter of having Meryl Streep standing in front of me.
“Hi, Meryl. It’s lovely to meet you,” I’ll say, and thank God for “you.”
