Voseo
Vos had been traditionally used in Argentina, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines and Uruguay, even in formal writing.
In the dialect of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay (known as 'Rioplatense'), the usage of vos is prevalent, even in mainstream film, media and music.
It is also present in Judaeo-Spanish, spoken by Sephardic Jews, where it is the archaic plural form that vosotros replaced.
Voseo is seldom taught to students of Spanish as a second language, and its precise usage varies across different regions.
[7] Nevertheless, in recent years, it has become more commonly accepted across the Hispanophone world as a valid part of regional dialects.
Starting in the early Middle Ages, however, languages such as French and Spanish began to attach honorary significance to these pronouns beyond literal number.
The following extract from a textbook is illustrative of usage at the time: We seldom make use in Spanish of the second Person Singular or Plural, but when through a great familiarity among friends, or speaking to God, or a wife and husband to themselves, or a father and mother to their children, or to servants.
O Dios, sois vos mi Padre verdadéro, O God, thou art my true Father; Tú eres un buen amígo, Thou art a good friend.The standard formal way to address a person one was not on familiar terms with was to address such a person as vuestra merced ("your grace", originally abbreviated as v.m.)
This was the situation when the Spanish language was brought to the Río de la Plata area (around Buenos Aires and Montevideo) and to Chile.
In time, vos lost currency in Spain but survived in a number of areas in Spanish-speaking America: Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia (east), Uruguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and some smaller areas; it is not found, or found only in internally remote areas (such as Chiapas) in the countries historically best connected with Spain: Mexico, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Equatorial Guinea.
[2] The possessive pronouns of vos also coincide with tú
vos (informal) vosotros All modern voseo conjugations derive from Old Spanish second person plural -ades, -edes, -ides, and -odes (as in sodes, 'you are').
[16] Venezuelan Maracucho Spanish is notable in that they preserve the diphthongized plural verb forms in all tenses, as still used with vosotros in Spain.
In the Río de la Plata region, both the tú-conjugation and the voseo conjugation are found, the tú-form being more common.
In this variety, some studies have shown a pragmatic difference between the tú-form and the vos-form, such that the vos form carries information about the speaker's belief state, and can be stigmatized.
[21] In South America: In Central America: In South America: In the following countries, voseo is used only in certain areas: In the following countries, voseo has disappeared completely among the native population: The traditional assumption that the Chilean and River Plate voseo verb forms are derived from those corresponding to vosotros has been challenged as synchronically inadequate in a 2014 article,[16] on the grounds that it requires at least six different rules, including three monophthongization processes that lacks phonological motivation.
Alternatively, the article argues that the Chilean and River Plate voseo verb forms are synchronically derived from underlying representations that coincide with those corresponding to the non-honorific second person singular tú.
In both Chilean and Rioplatense Spanish, the voseo form assigns stress to the syllable following the verb's root, or its infinitive in the case of the future and conditional conjugations.
[16] In some countries, the pronoun vos is used with family and friends (T-form), like tú in other varieties of Spanish, and contrasts with the respectful usted (V-form used with third person) which is used with strangers, elderly, and people of higher socioeconomic status; appropriate usage varies by dialect.
[24] With the changing mentalities in the Hispanic world, and with the development of descriptive as opposed to prescriptive linguistics, it has become simply a local variant of Spanish.
