In English, is it tu or vous?

Imagine for a minute that you are teaching English to a group of students who speak a language in which you are forced to choose, often consciously, the pronoun — formal or informal — you will use when you speak to any other person.

French works that way, and so do most European languages. In French, you say tu, the familiar form, to one set of people, and vous, the formal pronoun, to a different set of people.

You don't normally switch back and forth, saying tu to a person on one occasion and vous on another. In fact, there is often a progression involved, from vous toward tu. Once you have stopped saying vous and started saying tu to a particular person, there's no going back.

In other words, the tu/vous distinction matters greatly. You can't just say whatever comes into your head. It is possible to mightily offend a person who expects to be addressed as vous if you instead say tu. And someone who expects you to say tu will be perplexed, have hurt feelings, or even be angered if you say the formal vous.

Another complication is this: Who decides? In most situations, if an individual says tu to another, the other ones says tu back. It's the same with vous. But there are many exceptions.

There are some stated rules, but the choice of a pronoun is more or less intuitive to French speakers. In only a few cases is the choice perfectly clear. You always say tu to children and animals (pets, for example). You always say vous to a stranger who is older than you are and with whom you are having an impersonal interaction, in for example a business or official situation.

But there are, for example, children who learn to say vous to their mother or father; sons- and daughters-in-law who always say vous to their parents-in-law; and students and teachers who say tu to each other.

Here's an interesting case. Roselyne, the bread lady who delivers our daily baguette de pain, has always said tu to me. I don't remember her consistently saying vous when we first started talking to each other. Maybe it's because she knows I am a foreigner and knows that English-speakers don't make the tu/vous distinction.

Or maybe she knows absolutely nothing about the English language. Maybe it's because we are out in the country, where most people seem to say tu to each other much more easily that in Paris or other cities. Maybe it's my age, and hers. I don't know. But at the same time, Roselyne calls me "Monsieur" — she always sings out "Bonjour, Monsieur!" when she drives up. I sometimes say just "Bonjour!" and sometimes I say "Bonjour, Madame!" Then we say tu to each other.

Once in a while, Roselyne will say vous to me, but I think she is talking in the plural in those cases — talking about me and Walt. "Qu'est-ce que vous faites de beau aujourd'hui?" — what are you two up to today? — for example. That makes it complicated to know what's going on linguistically, since the plural form is also the formal form. I think the no-going-back rule applies here. She says tu to me nearly all the time, and there's no reason why she would suddenly use the formal vous. It has to be the plural.

By the way, I don't know if Roselyne knows that I know that Roselyne is her first name. I don't know her last name. She probably doesn't know my first or last name. Or maybe she does. I know I have talked about Walt to her, so she must know his first name. Maybe he has mentioned Ken to her. All in all, our interactions are extremely friendly but still formal on some level.

You can read more about my experiences with tu and vous in Saint-Aignan by looking at this blog entry.

Now here's my question. When we say you to people in English, are we saying vous or tu?

Remember that all of us human beings look at the world through the filter of our own native language. If the language you learned from your parents requires the tu/vous pronoun distinction, it is hard to imagine or even accept the idea that a language can exist without that feature.

Maybe no language can.

Historically, English you is the second-person plural pronoun, exactly like French vous. So it would be normal for French-speakers to assume that we all go around saying vous to each other all the time. We are therefore more formal as a people (we Anglo-Saxons!), or at least the nature of our linguistic communication is more formal.

Do you think that's true?

Our tu form, thou — and thee and thy, which are the second-person equivalents of first-person me and my — disappeared from standard English centuries ago. Did English-speakers decide, as a group, that it was a bad idea for people to go around saying tu to each other all over the place?

What replaced thou when it disappeared? Assuming it needed to be replaced...