And what language and region is it?
I’ve noticed my language teacher uses the informal you in one language and the formal one in the other.
And what language and region is it?
I’ve noticed my language teacher uses the informal you in one language and the formal one in the other.
In French/France I use the formal vous when talking to strangers or customers. Here people generally switch pretty quickly to the informal tu when they get to know each other (at my first day at work with my colleagues and boss). But I’m quite an oddball since I use the formal address even for kids, which no one does. Also my neighbor was a bit annoyed at me for continuing to say vous to her after having met her one month ago. It can make people feel old.
Living in Quebec this is my own private little social anxiety nightmare when meeting new people. You want to talk about pronouns? This is the real pronouns issue. Do I go with tu and seem overly familiar? Do I go with vous and seem standoffish? Does it depend on age? Degrees of separation? Station in life? Nnnnnnnnnngggggghhhh
Vousvouy-ing kids makes me feel whimsical, like Mary Poppins, so of course I do it too at times. 😅
I always refer to someone by “vous” until I ask permission to “tutoyer”, unless they start referring to me with “tu”. It’s tricky to figure out when is the right moment to switch unless someone decides to switch for you. I much prefer English because of this.
How about in a uni class? My teacher uses ‘vous’ and ‘du’. That’s what prompted the question!
I speak French and German on a daily basis and German speaking people tend to use the du (or sometimes Du) more often than French speaking people. For both languages though, people tend to go more often with the informal forms in the rural areas and more with the formal form in the cities. This is for Switzerland and people in Germany or France may have slightly different habits.
Maybe your teacher uses vous not as a formal address to one student but rather to speak to the whole class? Or he/she respects some students more than others and uses vous to talk to them, in spite of the age difference.
The former is what I used to think, but I’ve been noticing she does it in one-on-one conversation as well, and as far as I can tell, that’s the case for everyone. Also, in written assignments, in the beginning, it would be, for example, ‘schreibe […]’ and is now ‘escrivez […]’
It’s also a uni class, so not all students are younger than the teacher.