11.2 Tu, vous, and French politeness — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say what the choice between tu and vous signals socially, and why it is a choice you cannot avoid making. Decide which of the two to use in the ordinary situations a visitor meets, and say who is entitled to propose the switch from one to the other. Say when a handshake is expected and when a kiss on the cheek is, and what to do when you cannot tell. Use Monsieur and Madame the way French uses them, which is not the way English uses sir and madam . Prerequisites : 11.1, 6.1 — you should know how widely French is used, and you should have worked through at least the first conversation lesson, where the two pronouns were introduced; see 11.1 Background if you need it. Of everything in this course, this lesson describes the part of French that English speakers get wrong most often and notice least. Word order errors are audible and get corrected; a wrong pronoun is not, because correcting it would itself be rude, so the mistake goes on being made. It does not stop you being understood. It changes what people think you meant. The difficulty is not the grammar. You have known since the first conversation lesson that vous takes a plural verb and tu a singular one. The difficulty is that the grammar forces a social judgement into every sentence with a second person in it, and refusing to judge is not one of the options. What English gave up English used to have both, and threw one away. Older English had a singular thou and a plural you , and used them for social distance in much the way French still does. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the singular was driven out of ordinary speech, and standard English has had a single second-person pronoun for something like four hundred years. When you read thou in a Bible or in Shakespeare it therefore sounds elevated, which is the reverse of what it meant at the time: it was the intimate form. The real burden is that there is no neutral option. English lets you address a stranger, a child, a judge and a friend with the same word, and so lets you decline to register the relationship at all. French does not offer that. Whichever pronoun you choose, you have said something about the distance between you and the person in front of you, and saying nothing is impossible. A learner who hopes to stay out of the question by avoiding the second person will find that ordinary conversation makes that impossible within a minute. English does still mark this, but with other machinery. You have first names against titles, could you possibly against give me , and a whole apparatus of hedging. The distinction is not foreign to you; it is carried by different parts of the sentence. French has all of that machinery too, and a pronoun on top — and a native speaker has been making the judgement since childhood, without deliberating, where you will be making it consciously for a long while. Terms French has nouns for both practices and verbs for both acts, which English has to paraphrase. Those nouns and verbs head the table below and are worth learning, because they are how French speakers talk about the problem among themselves; the last rows add the words for courtesy and for the greetings that go with it. Term What it means le vouvoiement the practice of addressing someone with the polite form le tutoiement the practice of addressing someone with the familiar form vouvoyer to address someone with the polite form tutoyer to address someone with the familiar form la politesse politeness, courtesy; also a polite remark or gesture la bise the light kiss on the cheek used as a greeting une poignée de main a handshake The two verbs are ordinary transitive verbs and the object is the person: Tu peux me tutoyer. [1] means You can address me informally. , and is one of the standard ways of proposing the switch. The reciprocal takes a reflexive: Nous nous vouvoyons. [2] means We address each other as "vous". , which is the state a working relationship often settles into for years. Which one, when No rule covers every case, and French speakers themselves hesitate and disagree. The table is a safe starting position for a visitor, and it errs towards the polite form, which is the direction in which error is cheap. Situation Which form Any adult you have just met vous Shops, restaurants, offices, officials, doctors vous , in both directions A colleague at work, on the first day vous until told otherwise A child, or a teenager tu Family, close friends, a partner tu Other students in a class, people your own age at a party tu is usual, and often immediate Fellow members of a club, a team, a political party tu is common regardless of age Anyone in writing, unless you already use the familiar form vous An animal tu Two of those rows deserve comment. The row about people your own age has moved most in the last generation: among students, and in much of the technology industry, the familiar form is now the default from the first sentence, and the polite form there can make you sound stiff. The row about clubs reflects something older — shared membership of a group has long licensed the familiar form between strangers. The asymmetric case matters too: an adult speaking to a child uses the familiar form and is answered with the polite one, and that is the clearest case where the two forms are not expected to match; the same imbalance can appear between, say, an older person and a much younger adult. The switch, and who proposes it Relationships move, and the pronoun moves with them, in one direction only: from the polite form to the familiar, essentially never back. Because the move is one-way it is negotiated rather than assumed, and there is an etiquette about who may propose it. The older person, the more senior, or the host proposes; the younger, the junior or the guest waits to be asked. Proposing upwards is the error to avoid. The proposal is usually explicit, and the corpus has the most direct form of it: Tu peux me tutoyer. [1] If you are unsure