Comparative linguistics question: how common are formal/informal second person pronouns?

[xiphias]

So, Spanish distinguishes between "tu" and "usted". French has "tu" and "vous". German has "du" and "sie", and Japanese has something similar, I think.

English USED to use "thou" and "you" the way French uses "tu" and "vous", but eventually dropped "thou".

So, which is more common: for a language to HAVE this second-person-pronoun formality distinction, or to LACK it? What are some other examples in other languages?

I figure, I've got a bunch of linguistic geeks on my friends list who might be interested in this question.

Comments

[asqmh.livejournal.com]

German has "du" and "Sie."

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Not a linguistic geek, but I think it's quite common among the Indo-European languages. I have no idea how common it is outside them.

[cheshyre]

The followup question is which gets used more...

Spanish has formal and informal versions of you -- both singular and plural.
However (when I took high-school Spanish), although Spain still uses the second-person-plural-informal, Central- and South-American Spanish has mostly dropped it, using only the second-person-plural-formal. Kept both second-person-singular distinctions, but dropped the plural.

Well, I found that interesting.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

Indeed, the quickest way to show a Mexican that you're not from there is to use "usted" when addressing anyone who isn't your boss's grandmother, royalty or the Pope. It sounds very Shakespearean to their (and I admit, my) ears.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

What interests me is that according to my old Spanish text, "usted" comes from "vuestra merced" (Your Grace) and so it must be a later form, BUT all Romance languages AFAIK (meaning, I have no idea what Romanian does) do have formal and informal forms, which says to me that Latin likely did also. So my guess is that vuestra is from an older polite form, once used with a title to make an *extremely* polite form, which has since dropped down a notch on the courtesy scale. (Unless you're in Mexico, apparently :-)

Mandarin has "ni" for informal and "nin" for formal but I haven't yet figured out when I need to use the formal one. "Nimen" is you plural but I also don't yet know if there's a formal plural. (If so, it's probably "ninmen".) Dutch has "je" and "U" but these days it's almost always "je" for people you know - when I asked my friend Grada about it, she said that of *course* I would use "je" if I met her sister (a decade older than I am and a distinguished scholar) but conceded that "U" would still be proper for their mother (in her 90s and quite a grande dame, given the equivalent of a knighthood by the Queen not long ago).

It does strike me as interesting that Hebrew has no formal form, especially given its history - since it wasn't spoken colloquially for so long, some features have been retained that I'd expect to elide and simplify in a modern language, like the very complex grammar.

If you're interested in pursuing this farther, the linguaphiles comm seems to have quite a bunch of erudite members.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

French has the formal/informal split only for second-person-singular, not for second-person-plural. I don't remember enough of my German to be sure, but I think they also have the singular but not the plural.

Kiralee

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

German has Du/Sie in the singular and Ihr/Sie in the plural.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Kreyòl has also dropped it from the root French.

[elgoose.livejournal.com]

Portuguese has "tu" and "você" in the same way. What I find interesting is that they're used differently in Portugal and Brazil. In Portugal, it's the more predictable informal/formal, whereas in Brazil, people generally use "você" for everyone. "Tu" has class connotations that "você" doesn't, in most cases. What I've been told is that it's typically used more in the northeast, which is stereotyped as the hick region, rather equivalent to old stereotypes of the American South.

[sethg]

...and Spanish dialects in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central America has "vos", which none of my Spanish textbooks prepared me for.

[florafloraflora.livejournal.com]

"Você(s)" is the informal "you" (singular and plural) in Brazilian Portuguese, except that "tu" is more common in the far southern states (maybe because of the Spanish-language influence there) and in the Northeast, where it is part of a general archaic quality in the language (along with the hard "t" and "d" sounds, which in the rest of the country are often pronounced as "tch" and "dj"). In most of the country, "tu" sounds archaic. You might hear it in really sappy love songs or poetry, but that's about it.

[richardf8]

English USED to use "thou" and "you" the way French uses "tu" and "vous", but eventually dropped "thou".

Actually this is an outright borrowing from the french. In Old English þu was singular and ge was plural. This is both in the nominative case. Eow would be second person plural accusative IIRC.

[yndy.livejournal.com]

It's more common for a language to have it.

English is a very "mutable" language. Not truly a "Romance" language as many people think... You've got this Germanic based language, with elements of Saxon, Celtic, and Gaelic - then you've got William the Conqueror in 1066 introducing French as the 'official court language' which brings in all of the French influences and the "Romance" (Latin-based) language elements.

That said, pretty much all root languages that have pronouns have separate 2nd person singular and plural forms - I, We, You (singular)/Thee(thou), You (plural)/Y'all, He/She/It, They.

[sethg]

I can't give statistics, just data points that I know about:

In Biblical Hebrew, people sometimes refer to themselves as "your servant" when speaking to someone of higher status. In the Aramaic of the Talmud, people sometimes say "this man" or "this woman" instead of "I" as a sort of avoid-the-Evil-Eye circumlocution: "this woman has ten sons and only one of them is by my husband" (I can't find the textbook I learned this from so I can't give you a daf citation).

ASL has formal pronouns but they're not really used as status markers; they're more like the sort of signs you might use if you're introducing yourself or someone else on stage.

Vietnamese is uses kinship terms for most of its pronouns.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

Neither Arabic nor Hebrew have formal "you" pronouns to the best of my knowledge. They do have plural forms, though. *two cents*

[tendyl.livejournal.com]

Arabic does use the 2nd person plural to indicate formality, however there are no official pronouns. There are a lot of honorific titles and those are used more often.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Japanese does, indeed, have formal (anata) and informal (kimi) pronouns for "you." In fact, it also has formal (watashi) and informal (boku) pronouns for "I/me." OTOH, it's my understanding that native Japanese speakers hardly ever use personal pronouns when speaking with each other, unless the situation is extremely formal (and possibly not even then, I'm not sure). That's one of the things that tends to give them trouble when learning English and, presumably, other languages.

pronouns in japanese

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

the more formal things are, the _less_ likely pronouns for "i" and "you" are used in japanese. they're used when it isn't obvious from the prior context whom one is talking about, when it might be confusing otherwise.

they're left out in general for two main reasons: 1) because there is no grammatical requirement to have a subject in a japanese sentence, and it is often implied from prior speech. 2) because social status matters a whole lot in japan, and this complex aspect is more easily handled with honorifics which can get very specific. it's more common (and safer) to refer to somebody you don't know well with the appropriate honorific than with a pronoun -- some pronouns change meaning depending on who uses them towards whom ("anata" is also what women call their husbands, for example, and "omae" is so complicated i haven't yet figured it out).

to complicate things even more japanese has many more pronouns than we do -- i can think off-hand of 8 ways to say "you", and there are more. so if you need to use one, you better know exactly where you stand in regard to the other person (social position, familiarity, respect), so you don't inadvertantly insult anyone. there are aso gender differences in who uses which pronoun; dropping the "w" from "watashi" is a very girly cute thing to do; if you're not a cute girl you might give quite a strange impression if you use it. :)

actually they're not even pronouns in the way we understand them, they also have other meanings. in english pronouns have no other meanings, but in japanese "watashi" means not only "i", but also "private/personal", boku can mean "i" or "you" or "servant", etc.

it's fun to research, but oi, not so fun to use with real people. :)

[practicallyfame.livejournal.com]

I'll link my mother, domiobrien to this entry, she'll be able to answer regarding Irish Gaelic. ;)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mandarin has it. I can't speak for Cantonese (for which read: "I can't speak Cantonese"), but I'd be surprised if it wasn't common throughout the Chinese languages.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

To the best of my understanding, Korean has both formal and informal second-person pronouns, but seldom uses second-person pronouns at all.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Russian has it.. toi and voi (can't type cyrillic, sorry).

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Scots used thoo/ye in the singular until about the twelfth century, with some dialects keeping it (or some variant) for longer; the dialect spoken in Shetland still uses du/you. I don't think any dialect of Scots makes a distinction in the plural; it's you, youse, ye or yese depending on dialect and emphasis.

Scottish Gaelic uses thu/sibh in the singular, but makes no distinction in the plural, where both are sibh.

Koine Greek made no distinction; I don't know about later or earlier forms of Greek.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I had thought it was mostly a European language phenomenon, but the examples on the inevitable Wikipedia page seem to be pretty far-ranging. I don't see anything Native American, but it's tough to make any generalizations about that set of languages anyway.

[eerielass.livejournal.com]

Looks like you got your answer many times over, but I'll chime in. Even if not in modern use, I think every language I've ever read anything about has it. Even the !Kung language has some extra clicks involved for the formal "you" pronoun.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

As mentioned above, Russian has it. I don't recall learning two sets in Latin, but it's possible that a) I've forgotten, and did know them once b) they existed, but we didn't learn them, or c) they've been lost to the sands of time

no distinction in Gaelic

[domiobrien.livejournal.com]

no formal versus informal "you", not in Irish, Scots, or Manx...

thou\you

[(Anonymous)]

Most European languages followed this fashion. My impression is that English is in the minority. In fact I know of no other European language with only one form.
Some are more complex.

Early modern German had du - informal or abusive for intimates or inferiors the plural was ihr
ihr was also used as a singular addressing an inferior,
servants refered to each other as Er or Sie (he or she),
the upper classes used Sie (in this case they,)
what we have left is du informal with its plural ihr
and Sie (they) used as the polite form.

Italian has tu as informal with its plural voi and uses Lei (she) with its plural Loro (they) as the polite form using third person verbs.

Some think that these forms developed from the late roman empire fashion of addressing people of high status by abstractions "your highness", "your excellency" etc, and transferring this to pronouns.

Someone asked about Romanian. Like other Romanic languages it has tu and voi as informal singular and plural but also uses dumneata (d-ta) as an informal singular and dumneavoastra (dvs.) as a polite form with 2nd person plural verb endings. Both are derived from Latin - dominatio + tua or vestra, = your lordship.

It is also interesting to observe that the levelling in English was for everyone to use the polite form ye/you. My experience of modern European languages is that levelling happens the other way thou/du/tu etc.