Voseo: where vos survives and why

El voseo

c. 1500–. Vos comes from Latin vos, 'you' (plural), which Romance speakers also used as a respectful singular.

What happened

Vos comes from Latin vos, 'you' (plural), which Romance speakers also used as a respectful singular. In 16th-century Spain three forms competed for one person: tú (intimate), vos (familiar but once respectful) and vuestra merced, which became usted. As vuestra merced spread, vos lost value: by the 17th century it was used only with close friends or inferiors, and in the 18th the Academy codified the two-way system tú/usted; vos died out in Spain. In America it did not. Lapesa explains that where the viceregal courts of Mexico and Lima set the fashion, and in the Antilles, vos disappeared as in Spain; but in regions far from courtly taste, mixed systems grew with vos and singular or plural verb forms. Today voseo runs from Chiapas to Patagonia: Central America except Panama, the Río de la Plata, and parts of Chile, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela. Argentina's Academia de Letras accepted it as the educated norm in 1982.

Read about it

• El voseo — The voseo
• Tú, usted and vos — Tú, usted y vos

Connected

• Columbus reaches America (12 October 1492)
• Andrés Bello's grammar for Americans (1847)
• Lunfardo: the words of immigrant Buenos Aires (c. 1870–1920)
• One grammar and one spelling for 22 countries (2009–2011)

Sources

1. Aspectos histórico-pragmáticos del voseo (Thesaurus LI, 1996) — Centro Virtual Cervantes / Instituto Caro y Cuervo
2. Unidad y diversidad del español: el voseo (Congreso de Valladolid, N. Cartagena) — Centro Virtual Cervantes
3. El voseo, presente en la literatura (Instituto Cervantes Brasilia, 2012) — Centro Virtual Cervantes