Voseo The pronoun "
vos" is used in some areas of Latin America, particularly in Central America, Argentina,
Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, the state of Zulia in Venezuela, and the Andean regions of Colombia, Bolivia, Perú, and Ecuador. These are all distant from the large Spanish colonial cities, like Mexico City, Cartagena (Colombia), and Lima. In some areas, like the River Plate region,
vos has become the only generic form of address for the second-person singular, that is, it has the same meaning that
tú has elsewhere (informal and intimate). In other areas, like Chile, it persists as a fairly stigmatized form alongside the more prestigious
tú. In some other areas, it is employed among equals but not for very close people (couples or family) or to
inferiors (children, animals etc.), where the pronoun
tú would normally be used.
Ladino uses
vos as well but uses it as in
Old Spanish (see above), that is, as a respectful form of address, equivalent to how
usted is used elsewhere. In fact, Ladino does not use
usted at all because
vos implies the same respect that it once had in Old Spanish. In Ladino,
tú is used towards anyone in an informal manner. In the local
Spanish-based creole,
Chavacano, the use of
vos coexists alongside
tú and
usted depending on level of intimacy, commonality, and formality.
The use of vusted and vuestra merced The variant
vusted/
vustedes is mostly a regionalism in some countries in South America. It is common in isolated areas of
Colombia and
Venezuela. Other speakers consider it archaic because it is an older form of a contraction of
vuestra merced. Over time,
vuestra merced shifted from an honorific noun phrase to a pronoun through a process of phonetic reduction and grammaticalization, with commonly described intermediate forms such as
vuesarced and
vusted before the standardized form
usted became dominant in most varieties of Spanish. Some regional speech communities preserve these transitional or related forms. In parts of Colombia,
su merced remains in use and may function interchangeably with
usted as a respectful form of address.
Su merced can also appear in the
vocative case when addressing an older person, as in
Su merced, ¿por qué no vienen vusted y sus nietos a mi casa esta tarde? Vuestra merced (literally "your grace") is the origin of
usted,
usarcé and similar forms that govern third-person verb forms with a second-person function. They are now confined mostly to period works. It is unlikely that the similar-sounding Arabic (), meaning "professor", was involved in the formation of Spanish
usted because of the weakness of the semantic link and the fact that
usted is not documented before 1598, over a century after the fall of
Moorish Granada.
Use of Today, the informal second-person plural pronoun is widely used by Spaniards except in some southwestern regions and in most of the
Canary Islands, where its use is rare. Among the former colonies of the
Spanish Empire, the use of and its normal conjugations is also retained in the
Philippines and
Equatorial Guinea. In the
Ladino of Sephardic Jews, the only second person plural is (i.e. there is no , as in standard Spanish). Throughout Latin America, the second person plural pronoun is almost always used orally in both formal (singular ) and informal (singular ) contexts. However, and its related forms are not unheard of in Latin America. The use of was more widespread in formal, educated speech in Hispanic America around the time of the
Spanish American wars of independence. Even in modern times, the use of may still be found in
oratory, legal documents, or other highly formal or archaic contexts in Latin America.
Spanish studies scholar has noted that because the "use of archaic Spanish can give an impression of authority and wisdom", Latin American Spanish speakers will sometimes use to achieve a specific rhetorical effect; he observed that the notion "that is not used in Spanish America is one of the great myths of Spanish language instruction, at least in the U.S.", citing as an example the following quote, which employs the
genitive (possessive) form of the word, :
Creoles Forms based on
vosotros and
vos are used in many
Spanish-based creole languages. In
Chavacano, spoken in the Philippines,
vo is used alongside
tu as a singular second-person pronoun in Zamboangueño, Caviteño, and Ternateño. In Zamboangueño,
evos is also used. For the plural, Zamboangueño has
vosotros while Caviteño has
vusos.
Papiamento, spoken in
Aruba,
Bonaire, and
Curaçao, maintains
boso (singular) and
bosonan (plural). Since it was used with slaves, the forms that seemed disrespectful in the rest of America were common. ==Other forms==