If you studied\u00a0Spanish in a high school classroom, you probably learned on day one about the two different forms of addressing someone in the second person: t\u00fa<\/i> and usted<\/i>. Not so hard–one for familiar folks like friends and family, the other for the people you’d give a “Mr.” or “Mrs.” to in English, and ya<\/i>, done.<\/p>\n
Except that’s only two-thirds of the story.<\/p>\n
If you ever take off backpacking through Latin America, go far enough and someone will inevitably ask you: “de d\u00f3nde sos?<\/i>” This is the voseo<\/i>: in this case\u00a0sos\u00a0<\/em>is the form of the verb\u00a0ser\u00a0<\/em>conjugated for the second-person pronoun\u00a0vos<\/em>, which you may have never encountered in a formal study setting.\u00a0Vos\u00a0<\/em>is\u00a0a different pronoun that’s used by tens of millions of Spanish speakers from Guatemala\u00a0to Argentina and many places in between. In many Spanish dialects<\/a>,\u00a0it just takes\u00a0the place of t\u00fa<\/i>,\u00a0but in\u00a0others it peacefully and confusingly coexists alongside the more familiar pronoun.<\/p>\n You don’t need to learn to use the voseo<\/i> to speak great Spanish, but if you want to really understand the language as it’s spoken by millions in the Western Hemisphere, you’re just a couple conjugations away from mastering the voseo<\/i> form.<\/p>\n You’ll hardly ever greet a local in the Southern Cone of South America without prompting a “bien, y vos?<\/i>” in response.<\/p>\n In Argentina, just as in neighboring Paraguay and Uruguay, voseo<\/i> is universal: that familiar t\u00fa<\/i> you spent years studying in the classroom hardly appears south of the Tropic of Capricorn.<\/p>\n While these are the only parts of the Spanish-speaking world where vos<\/i> is the written and spoken standard, the tricky pronoun can be found in the speech of many other parts of Central and South America.<\/p>\n Not quite as dogmatic about their pronouns, Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans are partial to voseo<\/i>, but t\u00fa<\/i> crops up in certain contexts, sometimes marking a difference in familiarity and sometimes not.\u00a0Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and much of Colombia all use vos<\/i> regularly alongside t\u00fa<\/i>, and in parts of Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, it shows up in the language.<\/p>\n So if the Spanish speaking world can’t get on one page as to whether or not they even use voseo<\/i>, how can a language learner be expected to know how or when to use it? We’ll start with the hard part.<\/p>\n Why does Spanish even have multiple ways of saying “you” in the first place?<\/p>\n The complicated answer<\/a> has to do with Latin and etymology, but the simple one is that they’re used to differentiate between levels of familiarity, or the amount of social distance between you and your conversation partner.<\/p>\n In English we’re also aware of whether we’re addressing someone as a familiar or as socially distant: most twenty-something English speakers don’t just walk right up to a little old lady or a police officer and greet them by their first names.<\/p>\n In Spanish class, you learned that usted<\/i> is used for the unfamiliar cops and little old ladies, and t\u00fa<\/i> is reserved for your friends and peers. This isn’t a hard and fast rule anywhere in the hispanophone world, and when you throw in voseo<\/i>, it can create quite a chaos.<\/p>\n Some places are easy: in Argentina, for example, you can think of vos<\/i> as simply a replacement for or equivalent to t\u00fa<\/i>. Easy call: if you’d use t\u00fa<\/i> elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, substitute vos<\/i> here and you’re good to go. The same is true of Uruguay, Paraguay, and most of Costa Rica.<\/p>\n In other parts of the hispanophone world, voseo<\/i> coexists alongside tuteo<\/i>. This is where it can get tricky.<\/p>\n In Medell\u00edn and the surrounding Antioquia region of Colombia, for example, both voseo<\/i> and tuteo<\/i> are present. In this case, while usted<\/i> remains the go-to polite option, vos<\/i> serves a sort of intermediary role with people who seem a bit too familiar for usted,<\/i> yet not quite close enough for t\u00fa<\/i>: that can mean anything from not-super-close friends of a similar age to the friendly cashier at the corner store you’ve been going to for two years.<\/p>\n In other places, like in Honduras\u00a0and El Salvador, it’s the opposite: vos<\/i> is the affectionate term reserved for lovers and best friends, while t\u00fa<\/i> is the intermediary polite form.<\/p>\n And then you have places like Chile, where not only do both forms exist, but mixing and matching pronouns and verbs is no problem: a sentence starting with t\u00fa<\/i> followed immediately by a pronoun conjugated for vos<\/i> is an everyday occurrence here.<\/p>\n Use of the three you’s is highly particular to the country you find yourself in, so memorizing rules about it will do you little good. Instead, if you learn to conjugate and recognize verbs conjugated in voseo<\/i>, you’ll not only understand what’s being said to you, but you’ll probably be able to crack the code of how vos<\/i> is used in the region where you find yourself.<\/p>\n Knowing when to use vos<\/i> can be difficult, but conjugating verbs with it is easy.<\/p>\n For the standard voseo<\/i> conjugation, drop the r<\/i> from the end of your infinitive verb, add an s<\/i>, and move the stress to the last vowel.<\/b> Another way to explain it is that regular verbs in voseo<\/i> are conjugated just the same as tuteo<\/i>, but with the stress moved to the last syllable.<\/b><\/p>\n It looks like this:<\/p>\nWhere\u00a0It’s Used: Geographic Distribution of\u00a0Voseo<\/em><\/b><\/h3>\n
When\u00a0It’s Used: Picking the Right\u00a0Pronoun<\/b><\/h3>\n
How It’s Used: Conjugating with\u00a0V<\/em>oseo<\/i><\/b><\/h3>\n