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The second-person familiar plural is expressed in most of Spain with the pronoun vosotros and its characteristic verb forms (e.g., coméis 'you eat'), while in Latin American Spanish it merges with the formal second-person plural (e.g., ustedes comen). Thus, ustedes is used as both the formal and familiar second-person pronoun in Latin America.
2 Primarily in Spain; other countries use ustedes as the plural regardless of level of formality. A disused equivalent of vuestro(s)/vuestra(s) is voso(s)/vosa(s). [1] Note: Usted and ustedes are grammatically third person even though they are
Spanish studies scholar Daniel Eisenberg has noted that because the "use of archaic Spanish can give an impression of authority and wisdom", Latin American Spanish speakers will sometimes use vosotros to achieve a specific rhetorical effect; he observed that the notion "that vosotros is not used in Spanish America is one of the great myths of ...
In Hispanic America vosotros is not used, and the plural of both tú and usted is ustedes. This means that speaking to a group of friends a Spaniard will use vosotros, while a Latin American Spanish speaker will use ustedes. Although ustedes is semantically a second-person form, it is treated grammatically as a third-person plural form because ...
The plural imperative uses the ustedes form (i. e. the third person plural subjunctive, as corresponding to ellos). As for the subjunctive forms of vos verbs, while they tend to take the tú conjugation, some speakers do use the classical vos conjugation, employing the vosotros form minus the i in the final diphthong.
The pronouns yo, tú, vos, [1] él, nosotros, vosotros [2] and ellos are used to symbolise the three persons and two numbers. Note, however, that Spanish is a pro-drop language , and so it is the norm to omit subject pronouns when not needed for contrast or emphasis.
The possessive for usted and ustedes is su(s) as for other third-person pronouns. The ambiguity that this causes (especially considering that su(s) already covers "his", "her", "its" and "their") can be alleviated by treating usted(es) as a noun and thereby saying la casa de ustedes instead of su casa .
In Latin American Spanish, the opposite change has occurred—having lost the T form vosotros, Latin Americans address all groups as ustedes, even if the group is composed of friends whom they would call tú or vos (both T forms).