"You" Isn't "ty" — It's "vy": How People Around the World Address One Another Informally and Formally

The article explores how different languages and cultures handle forms of address on the spectrum between the informal and formal "you" (the so-called T–V distinction). It traces the historical development from Czech through Polish, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English all the way to East Asian languages (Japanese, Korean, Javanese), where systems of politeness reach far greater complexity. It shows that attempts by authoritarian regimes to change politeness forms from above mostly fail, whereas organic social shifts (such as the Swedish du-reform) succeed.

Imagine a Czech who flies into New York for the first time. In a café, the barista calls out to him: Hey, you! What can I get you? Our man thinks to himself: here everyone's on a first-name basis, no ceremony, no formalities. America, the land of equality.

But he's wrong. And he's profoundly wrong.

Because the English you is not the informal "you." It's the formal one. In origin, historically, and grammatically. The original English informal "you" — the pronoun thou — disappeared from everyday speech sometime in the 17th century. What remained is the formal, plural form of address. The English not only never use the informal form with anyone — they can't. They've lost the tool for it.

This paradox is the gateway to one of the most complex and remarkable phenomena of human communication: how people across cultures and centuries address one another formally and informally. Linguists call it the T–V distinction (from the French tu and vous), and we find its variants in nearly every European language — and, in various forms, far beyond Europe's borders as well. It tells us about power, intimacy, class differences, revolutions, and about how the internet is changing customs thousands of years old.

Let's begin where it's closest to home: in Czech.

Czech today distinguishes two basic registers: informal address (tykání) and formal address (vykání). It seems self-evident, but it wasn't always so.

Until the 15th century, Czechs simply used the informal form in everyday interaction. In the Czech Chronicle (Kronika česká) by Václav Hájek of Libočany (1541), even the legendary princess Libuše is addressed informally — no polite forms. It must be added, however, that Hájek is notorious for his loose handling of facts, and his chronicle is today regarded more as a literary work than a reliable historical source.

Formal address began to spread in Czech over the course of the 15th century, more markedly in the era of humanism. Jan Blahoslav (1523–1571), bishop of the Unity of the Brethren and author of a Czech Grammar, was among the figures who devoted themselves to cultivating the Czech language. The principle of formal address is the same as in most European languages: to address a single person in the second person plural — that is, the plural "you" instead of the singular — as a mark of respect. The roots reach back to late Rome in the 4th century, when emperors began to be addressed as vos instead of tu, and from there the custom spread through Latin into most European languages.

But Czech had yet another mode, today almost forgotten: onikání.

From the 18th century, under German influence, address in the third person plural spread. Instead of "pane, co jste se dočetl?" ("sir, what have you read?") people would say "pane, co se v té knížce dočetli?" (literally "sir, what have they read in that book?"). The German polite form Sie is, after all, grammatically identical to the third-person plural pronoun — oni/ony/ona (they) — and Czech simply adopted the pattern.

Alongside onikání there was also onkání: address in the third person singular, but this worked in the opposite direction — from the top down. The gentry used onkání toward servants, adults toward children. "Dojde mi pro pivo a nebude se nikde zdržovat." (literally "He shall fetch me some beer and shall not tarry anywhere.")

The Czech National Revival figures fought onikání as a Germanism. Kott's Czech–German Dictionary (1878–1893) summed up the attitude tersely: onikání was perceived as "in the German manner," whereas vykání was "in the Old Czech manner." In the novel F. L. Věk, Alois Jirásek captured onikání as a period feature — his characters speak that way because it was the standard of the 18th century. The Revival figures gradually established formal vykání as the sole polite form, even though onikání survived in some social strata — especially in the Jewish community, as Karel Poláček masterfully captured — well into the First Republic.

Today onikání is dead. It has survived in reruns of the F. L. Věk television series, in Poláček's Muži v ofsajdu (Men in Offside), and in Jewish anecdotes.

If we were to look for a language that not only did not reject third-person address but elevated it into the basic polite form, we need only look beyond our northern border.

Polish is exceptional in this respect among European languages. It has no polite pronoun of the type of French vous or German Sie. Instead it uses the forms of address pan (sir/gentleman) and pani (madam/lady) with a verb in the third person singular: Gdzie pan mieszka? — literally "Where does the gentleman live?", i.e. "Where do you live?".

Grammatically this is closer to Italian Lei or Spanish usted than to German Sie. And unlike Czech onikání, it is not a borrowing from German — the word pan has its own ancient origin. According to the etymologist Aleksander Brückner (Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego, 1927), it derives from the medieval župan, an administrator of a territory, and it appears in written sources from the 14th century. Modern etymology offers further hypotheses as well, but Brückner's derivation remains one of the most frequently cited.

Polish does have the form wy (second person plural, the counterpart of the Czech plural "you"), but historically it settled in more rural usage. In the towns pan/pani prevailed — and prevails to this day.

Interesting too is the failure of the communist regime, which after the war tried to eradicate pan as a relic of class society and replace it with the form wy (or with the address obywatel — citizen). Unlike in the Czech lands, where "soudruhu" (comrade) temporarily took hold, the Poles held on to pan/pani despite political pressure. The form wy was perceived as a foreign — communist — import and never caught on.

The result is a system in which even two people cursing at each other in the street still address one another as pan/pani. "Pan jest idiotą" ("The gentleman is an idiot") is a grammatically flawless Polish insult — in the third person singular, with a polite form of address.

The Russian system ты/вы (ty/vy) appears at first glance identical to the Czech one. But its history is different — formal address in Russian was markedly strengthened by the influence of French through the 18th-century aristocracy.

Peter the Great opened Russia to Western influences, and the Russian nobility began to orient itself toward Paris. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Russian aristocracy spoke French — literally as a mother tongue. With French came the consistent tu/vous distinction, which carried over onto the Russian ты/вы and entrenched the polite norm.

Russian has preserved a strong asymmetry to this day: a teacher addresses a student informally, the student addresses the teacher formally. A parent may address a child informally, but in traditional families children addressed their parents formally well into the 20th century. The Soviet regime introduced the address товарищ (comrade), but it did not abolish the ty/vy distinction — unlike the Scandinavian countries, where this was achieved by natural means.

In Eugene Onegin, Pushkin devoted an entire passage to the shift from formal to informal address — for the 19th-century Russian reader it was a moment charged with intimate and social meanings.

The French tu/vous is probably the best-known example of the T–V distinction in the world. And also the case of the most radical attempt to abolish it.

During the French Revolution, in November 1793, the National Convention issued a decree on compulsory informal address (tutoiement): all French people were to address one another as tu, because vous was perceived as a marker of feudal inequality. Everyone was to be citoyen (citizen) or citoyenne (female citizen), no monsieur or madame.

The decree lasted only a few years. Napoleon indirectly abolished it by restoring court customs, and vous returned in full force. The whole episode nonetheless showed something important: polite forms are deeply rooted and cannot be changed from above.

Today the French vous is gradually receding — chiefly in electronic communication and among younger generations. But it still holds that in France the shift from vous to tu (the so-called tutoiement) is a ceremonial moment, usually offered by the older, the higher-ranking, or the woman.

Italian offers a peculiar variant: the polite form of address Lei, which is grammatically the third person singular feminine — literally "she." It arose during the Renaissance from respectful turns of phrase such as Vostra Signoria (Your Lordship) — and because Signoria is feminine, the feminine pronoun Lei became fixed.

For Benito Mussolini, Lei was intolerable. In 1938 the Fascist regime banned it as "servile and foreign," as Mussolini himself declared, and ordered the use of Voi (the second person plural, that is, classic formal address). After the fall of Fascism, Lei returned at once.

It is one of the few documented cases in which an authoritarian regime tried to change polite distinctions by law — and failed. Like the French Revolution, the Italian attempt showed that polite forms resist political dictate.

The Spanish usted (shortened from Vuestra Merced — Your Grace) works much like the Polish pan: a polite form of address in the third person. ¿Cómo está usted? — "How is Your Grace?", i.e. "How are you?".

But Spanish has yet another layer that the European languages do not know: voseo. In many countries of Latin America — especially Argentina, Uruguay, and parts of Central America — vos is used instead of tú (informal "you"). It was originally the formal plural form of address (the counterpart of vous), which in Latin America became popularized and turned informal.

A paradox thus arose: the formal vos became the informal vos, while tú in some places disappeared entirely. In Buenos Aires you would say ¿Vos tenés hambre? (Are you hungry?), not ¿Tú tienes hambre?. It is in a sense the mirror image of the English story — where the formal you swallowed the informal thou, here the formal vos swallowed itself, only in the opposite meaning.

The German du/Sie is the system from which Czech borrowed onikání. The German Sie (always with a capital S) is grammatically the third person plural — exactly like the Czech "they." Herr Schwarz, wie geht es Ihnen? — literally "Mr. Schwarz, how are they doing?".

The shift from Sie to du in German is a ceremonial act called Brüderschaft trinken (drinking to brotherhood): two people hook arms, drink a toast, introduce themselves by first name, and from that moment on use the informal form. The ritual has been practiced for centuries and survives to this day — though often in a simplified form.

Germany, however, is undergoing a quiet transformation. In 2003, IKEA in Germany began addressing customers with du — which was perceived as a culture shock. Today Adidas, Apple, and a host of new companies do the same. In technology companies, informal address is becoming the norm. Traditional firms, banks, and government offices, however, insist on Sie.

And then there is Scandinavia — a region that has almost entirely abolished the T–V distinction. And not by revolutionary decree, but through natural development.

The turning point came in Sweden in 1967, when Bror Rexed, the newly appointed director general of the Socialstyrelsen (the National Board of Health and Welfare), in his inaugural speech to the staff began addressing everyone present with the informal form. It was not a decree, a law, or a manifesto — just the personal decision of an official, which resonated with the spirit of the times. Within a few years du had become the universal form of address, and the Swedish formal ni practically vanished.

Norway followed in the 1970s. Denmark is more conservative — the formal De still survives there in some contexts, but even it is receding.

The Swedish du-reformen is probably the most successful linguistic transformation in modern history — precisely because it was not a reform. No one ordered it. It simply arrived.

Now let us return to that Czech in the New York café. Why is the barista actually addressing him with the formal "you"?

Old English had the same system as the other Germanic languages: þū (thou) for the singular and gē/ēow (the predecessor of you) for the plural. No difference in politeness — just grammatical number.

The change came after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The Norman conquerors brought the French tu/vous model, and the English nobility adopted it: thou remained for intimates, ye/you began to be used as a polite form for a single person. The first attestations of the "polite ye" for a single person come from the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries.

Shakespeare and Chaucer alike worked masterfully with both forms. In Hamlet, the prince switches from you to thou in moments of anger or intimacy. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia switches between the forms depending on whether she is speaking as a judge or as a woman.

And then something happened that has no parallel in the European languages: thou disappeared.

Why? The linguists Roger Brown and Albert Gilman, authors of the seminal study The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity (1960), admit that we do not know the definitive answer. There are, however, three main explanations.

First, social uncertainty. In the 16th–17th centuries the English middle class was growing and social boundaries were blurring. It was not clear whom to address informally and whom formally. It was safer always to use the formal form — and so you became the universal choice.

Second, thou acquired negative connotations. It gradually came to be perceived as familiar, even insulting — to call someone thou was to imply that they stood lower.

Third — and this is the most surprising factor — the Quakers. The religious movement founded by George Fox around 1650 insisted on addressing all people with thou as an expression of equality before God. They refused to "exalt" anyone with you. By 1657 some thousand Quakers were in prison — and for a whole range of reasons: they refused to swear oaths, kept their hats on, disrupted church services, and, among other things, persistently used thou with judges and officials. The Quakers' thou became a mark of defiance, and thereby a further reason ordinary speakers avoided it.

The result is a paradox: English lost its informal form of address and kept the formal one. Every Englishman and American permanently addresses everyone "formally" — but because the other option does not exist, no one is aware of it.

Interestingly, thou survives to this day in two contexts: in the Yorkshire dialect ("Tha knows," "Does tha want a cuppa?") and in religious worship (the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible). And in both cases it is today perceived as loftier and more formal than you — the exact opposite of its original meaning.

The European system — two to three levels of formality — appears charmingly simple from the perspective of the East Asian languages.

Japanese keigo (敬語, literally "respectful language") distinguishes three main planes: teineigo (polite language, the endings -desu/-masu), sonkeigo (respectful language, which "elevates" the addressee), and kenjōgo (humble language, which "lowers" the speaker).

In practice this means that the verb "to go" exists in entirely different forms: iku (neutral), irassharu (respectful — when someone of higher standing goes) and mairu (humble — when I go to someone important). These are not endings or prefixes — they are linguistically completely different words.

And then there is the uchi/soto principle (内/外, inner/outer): you speak of your boss respectfully within the company, but when you telephone a client, you speak of that same boss in humble language — because toward the client your boss is part of your "inner circle," which is lowered. The same person is alternately exalted and lowered depending on whom you are saying what to.

Surveys suggest that only a minority of adult Japanese feel fully confident in using keigo. It is a system that native speakers never entirely master.

Korean arranges the social ladder even more openly. In theory it distinguishes seven speech levels, in practice four are commonly used: from the informal (panmal) to the formal (jondaenmal).

The decisive criterion is age — even a difference of a single year determines who speaks to whom and how. To use panmal with a person a year older is a social offense that can even provoke a physical clash.

Korean moreover extends kinship terms to non-relatives: a younger man addresses an older woman as ŏnni or nuna (sister) depending on the circumstances, even if they are meeting for the first time in their lives.

The most extreme system, however, is found in Javanese, spoken by nearly 70 million people on the island of Java. It distinguishes three main planes: ngoko (informal), madya (intermediate), and krama (formal) — and in each of them the entire vocabulary changes. Not endings, not prefixes, but completely different words.

The verb "to eat": mangan (ngoko) → nedha (krama) → dhahar (krama inggil, the highest form). The same sentence in ngoko and in krama sounds as if it were in a different language. To use ngoko with an older person is a grave social transgression in Javanese culture — comparable to what inappropriate panmal would mean in Korea.

Young Javanese today increasingly switch to Indonesian — the official language, which has no polite planes — precisely in order to avoid the system. Javanese krama thus faces an existential threat.

Across the world we observe one great trend: informalization. And its main driving forces are three.

The internet and social networks erase formal barriers. On social networks the formal form is hard to sustain — short messages, missing context, and hidden identity lead to universal informal address.

English as the worldwide language of communication spreads the model of "a single universal you." Young French people use the informal form more often on social networks, German startups switch to du, and even Polish pan/pani is receding among the younger generation in electronic communication.

Corporate culture plays a surprising role. IKEA began addressing customers with du in Germany in 2003 and thereby provoked a cultural debate. Today other companies do the same. An interesting rule holds: the more expensive the product, the more likely the company is to address you formally. A bank will say Sie to you, a new technology firm du.

In Japan, young women on the internet experimentally use the masculine pronoun ore (instead of the feminine atashi). In Korea, panmal is spreading among foreigners who do not understand the rules of the social ladder. Javanese krama is yielding to Indonesian.

Does this mean the end of formal address? Probably not. The Scandinavian example shows that the T–V distinction can be removed — but it happened in small, homogeneous societies with a strong egalitarian tradition. In most cultures the polite forms resist: they outlasted the French Revolution, Mussolini, and communism.

Systems of address function like an X-ray of social values. Socially stratified cultures (Japan, Korea) create complex multi-level systems in which the whole language changes according to the relationship of the speakers. Egalitarian cultures (Scandinavia) dissolve the formal forms. And cultures in transition (Germany, France, Poland) wage a constant negotiating struggle over where the line lies between intimacy and respect.

What remains most remarkable about it all, however, is that English paradox. A language that the whole world perceives as informal and egalitarian is in fact a language of permanent formal address. Every you carries within it a thousand years of history — of the Norman conquerors, of the social uncertainty of a growing middle class, and of the Quakers who went to prison for insisting on the right to say thou to everyone.

So the next time you are in a New York café and the barista calls out to you, Hey, you! — remember that she is actually addressing you formally. She just doesn't know it.

Transparency of creation

The concept, structure, and editorial line of the article are the work of the author, who prepared the content outline, established the key theses, and directed the entire creative process. Generative AI (Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic) was used as a tool for research, fact-checking, and elaborating the author's draft.

The author verified the key findings and approved the final wording. No part of the text was published without conscious authorial oversight. The factual data were verified against the publicly available sources cited in the text.

This procedure complies with the transparency principles of EU Regulation 2024/1689 (the AI Act). #poweredByAI