The vos of El Cid and the vos of Mafalda.

The starting point

A plural used to make one person bigger

Spanish inherited two uses of vos from Latin: the obvious plural, and a second one that appeared in late Latin, where you pluralised a single person in order to enlarge them. Addressing someone in the plural was a way of raising their standing.

Medieval Spanish therefore had a very simple system: two singular forms, tú and vos, and one plural, also vos. To clear up the ambiguity the plural was reinforced into vosotros. By the early sixteenth century vos was barely used as a plural at all.

Here is the interesting part. In the fifteenth century vos worked for almost anyone, and the contrast with tú was hardly used. The system ran rather like English does today, leaning on the names and titles around the pronoun. Distance was not marked by the pronoun but by what came after it.

The reversal

A new aristocracy wanted to be addressed in a new way

At the Trastámara court an elaborate formula came into fashion: vuestra merced, vuestra excelencia, vuestra alteza. Abstract nouns that also force the verb into the third person.

The explanation is a sociology textbook in miniature. There was a newly minted aristocracy, holding titles granted by royal favour rather than inherited by birth, which needed a distinctive and novel form of address to confirm in public that its position was real. A new form of address for a new class.

Vuesa merced spread very fast through the sixteenth century, above all in the growing cities of Seville and Madrid, where newcomers felt flattered to receive it and flattered their neighbours by returning it. From the second half of that century, it was the only socially acceptable way to mark distance, and vos, evicted from its job, drifted towards the territory of tú.

1. Wear and tear did the rest

   Vuestra merced eroded in everyday speech into usted. The first literary attestation is from 1620; in archival documents it appears in 1670 in Almería, 1692 in Venezuela and 1694 in Mexico. It is a seventeenth-century pronoun.

2. And this explains today’s map

   Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the regions with the earliest standardisation (Lima, Mexico City, Santo Domingo) and the closest contact with Spain (Venezuela, Cuba) dropped vos as incorrect. Where contact was weaker it survived. And because it had never been inside the educated norm, nobody regulated it: it evolved freely and differently in each place. Hence the enormous variation you find today.

Three kinds of voseo

The pronoun and the verb can go their separate ways

Calling a country «voseante» flattens things, because there are three possible combinations and each sounds different.

The paradigm around vos is a curious hybrid. Vos works as subject and after prepositions (a vos, más que vos), but the unstressed object pronoun is still te and the possessive is tu and tuyo. Nobody in Latin America says os quiero or vuestro: that stayed in Spain.

Nor does it affect every tense. Voseo rules the imperative (cantá, vení, decí) and the present (cantás, comés). The imperfect is untouched: it is vos cantabas, the ordinary form. Chile, as usual, is the exception.

Ustedeo

In Costa Rica, usted does absolutely everything

One example says it all: «¿usted qué quiere almorzar, mi papacito?», said to a five-year-old. There usted marks no distance whatsoever. It marks affection.

The phenomenon is Central American, but Costa Rica takes it furthest: there usted has become all-encompassing, a pronoun that covers a continuum from the most informal situation to the most ceremonious. With friends, with a partner, with children, with the dog and with the notary.

1. Colombia comes second, and there it depends on sex

   A study of university students in Bogotá found that men use usted with other men of their age and standing, while using tú with women. For the women it works the other way round: tú is the form of closeness and usted is kept for non-solidary relations.

2. So two systems live side by side

   A general two-part one, and a local one in which tú is trapped in the middle, between maximum intimacy (which is ustedeo) and cold usted. One pronoun can mean opposite things depending on who says it.

3. And there are more places

   The Venezuelan Andes, around Mérida and Táchira, where usted covers almost the whole range; the continental Caribbean; Chile; north-western Argentina; and the upper class of Buenos Aires, where it is on the rise.

Central America

Five countries, and in Guatemala the pronoun depends on who you are talking to

Against that background, Central America works as a laboratory.

1. Guatemala

   The choice between vos, tú and usted depends on factors such as the addressee’s sex, familiarity, formality and social group. In some male settings vos is favoured, while tuteo can acquire other social values.

2. Honduras

   Voseo is widespread and tuteo has a more restricted use. In rural areas and among some groups, ustedeo also appears towards people who are close, including children.

3. El Salvador

   Vos may be used for familiar address, tú for intermediate formality and usted in more formal situations. Their distribution changes with the social setting and the communicative situation.

4. Costa Rica

   The system is organised mainly around vos and usted, but tuteo has not disappeared: the RAE describes it as more restricted. The striking feature is that usted can also enter the territory of intimacy.

5. Nicaragua

   Voseo is general across social classes and may alternate with tuteo, whose value changes with formality and social group. Final stress is characteristic in voseante forms of the present indicative and subjunctive and in the imperative: cantás, cantés, cantá.

Central American voseo cannot be reduced to the speech of lower social groups. It is widely accepted in the educated norm, although tuteo may function as the prestige choice in situations of intermediate formality. The value of each pronoun depends on country, group and situation.

A note on the sources: Calderón Campos groups Costa Rica and Nicaragua among the countries where tú has dropped out of the system, whereas other descriptions record alternation between tú and vos in Nicaragua. The RAE’s Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts supports a more nuanced account: restricted tuteo in Costa Rica and general voseo, with possible alternation, in Nicaragua. We therefore do not present the disappearance of tú as an absolute fact.

A necessary distinction

Usted expresses more than respect: it also organises distance

Usted is the general form of respect in much of the Spanish-speaking world, but that is not its only value. It can also mark distance of rank, class or age and, in some communities, extend into affectionate address. Being respectful means using the form a community expects in a given situation, and that form is not the same in San José as in Madrid.

How address sounds

Three features of pronunciation that are really about class and identity

A full phonetic description of the region runs to many pages. But three features deserve to be lifted out of them, because they are not only sounds: they are social positions.

1. The s that gives away class, not region

   Aspirating a final s is common across the Spanish-speaking world. What stands out in Honduras and El Salvador is that the aspiration slips to the start of the word: la hemana, un hentavo, el Halbadó for El Salvador. It never appears in careful speech, nor among upper-class speakers even when relaxed. It tells you not where someone is from but where they come from.

2. The y that vanishes and is then invented

   First it drops: gaína, tortía, estrea. Then, fearing they have fallen short, speakers start inserting it where it never belonged: Mariya, friyo, ideya. Over-correcting is the reflex of someone who knows their speech is under suspicion, and sure enough, the result is stigmatised.

3. The Costa Rican r, moving the other way

   Costa Rica has a retroflex r that vaguely recalls American English to a foreign ear. What is interesting is that it carries no stigma: Costa Ricans do not avoid it and it is spreading among the young, while the traditional variant loses ground with those same speakers, who find it dated. Two features moving in opposite directions at once, which is what a living language does all the time.

Where to hear it

Forms of address make far more sense heard than read

There is plenty on YouTube: interviews with the Honduran writer Roberto Quesada, the documentary Identidad del guatemalteco, with speakers from different regions and ethnic groups, or the Autobuses de Costa Rica videos, where the assibilated tr is textbook.

Reference material

Samples with transcripts, and works of reference

The Instituto Cervantes catalogue has samples from Antigua, Tegucigalpa, San José and Joya de Cerén with transcripts alongside. For the grammatical and lexical detail:

• Instituto Cervantes: catalogue of Spanish voices, with audio and transcripts
• Real Academia Española: Nueva gramática de la lengua española
• Association of Spanish Language Academies: Diccionario de americanismos

10 · Bibliography

The works consulted for this article

The history and the classification of voseo come from Calderón Campos, read in full. For the country-by-country detail, all in Spanish:

1. Calderón Campos, Miguel (2010)

   “Formas de tratamiento”, in M. Aleza and J. M. Enguita (eds.), La lengua española en América: normas y usos actuales. Valencia: Universitat de València, pp. 225-236. Freely available online.

2. Fontanella de Weinberg, M.ª Beatriz (1999)

   «Sistemas pronominales de tratamiento usados en el mundo hispánico», en Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa.

3. Real Academia Española and ASALE

   Nueva gramática de la lengua española, §§ 16.15 and 16.17, on forms of address and voseo.

4. Association of Spanish Language Academies

   Diccionario de americanismos (2010), for the vocabulary cited here.

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