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French has a T-V distinction in the second person singular. That is, it uses two different sets of pronouns: tu and vous and their various forms. The usage of tu and vous depends on the kind of relationship (formal or informal) that exists between the speaker and the person with whom they are speaking and the age differences between these subjects. [1]
In Old French texts, the pronouns tu and vous are often used interchangeably to address an individual, sometimes in the same sentence. However, some emerging pattern of use has been detected by recent scholars. [21] Between characters equal in age or rank, vous was more common than tu as a singular address.
French has a complex system of personal pronouns (analogous to English I, we, they, and so on). When compared to English, the particularities of French personal pronouns include: a T-V distinction in the second person singular (familiar tu vs. polite vous) the placement of object pronouns before the verb: « Agnès les voit. » ("Agnès sees ...
Tu is by no means restricted to intimates or social inferiors. There is however an important minority of people who prefer to be addressed as vous. At Radio-Canada (the public broadcaster, often considered as establishing the normative objectives of standard French in Canada), the use of vous is widespread, even among colleagues. [citation needed]
Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases (Russian follows a similar pattern); German, where the third-person plural sie (capitalized as Sie) is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where ...
"Tu" is actually more likely to come from the 3rd person pronoun il with a euphonic -t-, as using a particle ti in exactly the same way is a feature found in the Oïl languages (other than French) in France and Belgium. Still, its use is often seen as a redundancy in a question for those who defend a standardized French.
Examples can be found in the specific language sections below. In languages that make a T–V distinction (tu vs. vous, du vs. Sie, tu vs. você, tú vs. usted, etc.) the use of particular forms of the second person imperative may also be dependent on the degree of familiarity between the speaker and the addressee, as with other verb forms.
French speakers of Quebec use the informal second-person pronoun tu more often and in more contexts than speakers in France do. In certain contexts it may be perfectly appropriate to address a stranger or even the customer of a store using tu , whereas the latter would be considered impolite in France.