I suspect I wasn’t the only grade school Spanish language learner for whom the vosotros form had a sort of rogue ninja presence. Easily avoidable in classroom skits, it would spring out of the shadows at the most inopportune moments (usually, a pop quiz) to remind us that no, we didn’t have a command on this language, not at all.
I still can’t properly conjugate in vosotros, also known as second person plural, also known as “y’all, with respect.” This is largely because I focused my studies on the Southern Cone and discovered I didn’t have to, although not for lack of River Plate ingenuity. Throughout Latin America, scratch vosotros. If you cross into Argentina or Uruguay, bienvenidos a vos.
Grammatically speaking, vos replaces tú and performs the function of second person singular. In all tenses but the present tense and command form, verbs are actually conjugated with tú constructions: “Did you walk along la Rambla?” would be “¿Vos caminaste por la Rambla?” But in the present tense: “¿Tenés la hora?” (Do you have the time?) instead of tienes. Orthographically, if you are really interested, the rules for the present tense are here.
Culturally, however, the use of vos is far more complex than just as a straight substitution for tú. Vos comes from “vuestra merced” or “your grace,” which derives from a Latin form of address for the Roman emperor. Sometime in the 19th century, vos transitioned into the least formal type of address in some parts of the former Spanish-American colonies. In Uruguay the hierarchy of formality means usted can be used in very formal situations, followed by tú and then vos – although oftentimes even if tú is used in the present tense, the verb it accompanies is still conjugated with vos verb endings. Confused yet?
Thankfully, in Uruguay, the use of vos – or the “voseo” – is used in a much wider range of situations than the tú is used in other countries. Stick with vos and you’ll mostly be ok. Except an adult student in my conversation class once confessed he gets into trouble with his older Venezuelan relatives for informality and not treating them with usted. And even in Uruguay the rules have their exception: the eastern administrative department of Rocha uses tú instead of vos.
¿Vos captás?
Flora Lindsay-Herrera is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Montevideo, Uruguay. For more about her experiences, check out her blog. For more musings on learning another language, check out these posts from other La Vida Idealist bloggers: “¿Dónde Está El Baño?“; “Help! I’ve Reached the Foreign Language Flatlands!”; “What Your Language Teacher Doesn’t Want You to Know”; “Could You Pick Up Some Milk and a Second Language While You’re Out?”; “Forget Language Teachers…I’ve Got Kids”; and “5 Surprises About International Volunteering: #2 – Language Non-Barriers.”
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I love you hear that someone else is stumbling through the vos form. We love it Guatemala too. Buena suerte vos!
Oh, heavens. I was lucky in Costa Rica … there were threats of “vos,” but it never came up. All we used there was “usted” — for everything. Now I’m doing Spanish school in Guatemala, and I have to re-learn “tu.”
Como se dice “fie”?