TUTOYER, verbe trans. [tytwaje]

« s’adresser à quelqu’un en lui disant tu. »

• (to address someone using tu)

VOUVOYER, verbe trans. [vuvwaje]

« s’adresser à quelqu’un en employant par politesse vous à la place de tu. »
• (to address someone using vous in place of tu)

[As always my initial instinct leads me to the TLFi to provide you with this information, and of course I must give credit where credit it due. I have, however, modified the organization of the article and replaced the parentheses surrounding the word tu in the definition by italics to harmonize with the TLFi’s use of italics in the article vouvoyer.]

2 French Words • 2 Foreign Concepts

Growing up speaking English and then trying to learn French as an adolescent makes it really difficult to really grasp all of the nuances and subtilities of when to use vous and when to use tu when addressing someone. So if you have some basic knowledge of languages like Spanish or French etc. ; you may be aware that there is more than one form of the pronoun you. So as you may have learned the French word tu is the more familiar you and vous is the formal you. This is where the subtilities come into play. (I’ll come back to this aspect of the tu/vous paradigme in a bit.)

Uses of vous (from easiest to most difficult [in my opinion]) :

1st use of vous –second person plural pronoun

To sum it up, in French there is a plural you – vous ; okay that is cool. I can understand the utility of having a plural you pronoun. In American English we can even observe that often speakers will use terms such as you guys, you all, ya’ll when refering to a plural you. One of the easiest instances in which you can use the vous form is, for example, if you are speaking to 2 friends at once, even though individual you may use tu with them. ( I remember the first time I spoke to 2 French girls at once and felt so stupid looking at them and saying vous, so I kept making sure that I looked back and forth at each of them a lot to make sure they knew that I was « vouvoying » them as an entity and that I didn’t just mess up and use the wrong form [which I have been known to do on an inopportune occassion]).

2nd use of vous –vouvoiement of cultural respect

As you may have learned in school, according to the norms of French in France, you should « vouvoie » your elders. Well that is easy if they are 80 years old. But so what do you do if you don’t want to offend someone be showing them that you are presuming that they are older than you ? ( What ? We’re not the same age ? Oh, but you look so young and cool.)

So I have decided to make you a list of people who are almost certain to be requiring you to expend some extra breath conjugating out extra syllables needed to agree your verb with the vous subject. And if time is money, and it takes more time to pronounce the same sentence with a vous than a tu, why not « tutoyer plus pour gagner plus » ?

People you probably ought to « vouvoie » (from most obvious to least obvious) :

• Government officials etc.
• Senior citizens
• Person interviewing you for a job
• Your teachers and professors
• Your boss (sometimes ? maybe ? depending on which one ? – You see it’s confusing)
• Servers
• Basically anybody you don’t really know (if you want to be respectful)

So when is it okay to « tutoie » somebody ?

Well, if you want to follow the French customs, you may start out by « vouvoying » somebody. Then at some point they may say something like, « on peut se tutoyer peut-être », or « tu peux me tutoyer », meaning « maybe we could tutoie each other », or « you can tutoie me ». (Apparently unbeknownst to me, yet knownst to others and hilarious for a French person, this « relationship update in your status » also implies that you shouldn’t be writing out things like :

• Monsieur Nom de Famille,
• Je voudrais savoir à quelle heure tu m’attends pour la réunion. […]
• Mr. Familyname,
• I would like to know at what time you(tu) expect me for the meeting.[…]).

So can I only tutoie someone if they tell me it’s okay ?

Absolutely not. Certain people, to whom I will refer as racailles « hoodlums », find it totally acceptable to confront others (me) with interactions like this one :

• Racaille : « Ey. T’as pas une clope ?! »
• Me : « Eh, non. »
• Racaille : « Salope. »
• [Basically,] « hey don’t ya got a smoke ? »
• « Um, no. » (I respond, while hurrying past)
• « Slut ».

So if you are trying to fit in with the racailles, you can just tutoie everyone. It depends which parts of French culture interest you.

So are the racailles the only ones that can just start off by tutoying people they meet for the first time ?

Heck, no. If you are Québecois, you already have a good excuse. The use of the tu instead of vous is more common than in France. (Maybe because they are more overt and initially friendly that the majority of the Parisian population I come across every day). If you are not Québecois but would like to pretend to be, or just brush up on your accent and learn French regional expressions in Québec I recommend the

têtes à claques.

Who am I sure to be able to tutoie ?

Well nobody is perfect and we all are bound to make mistakes here and there, I am pretty certain that most French people would say that this list would be a safe bet :

• Dogs
• Cats
• Babies
• That mean racaille that called you a slut for not having a cigarette

Hopefully that clears some of the initial confusion up. For more interesting tidbits of information on the French language and culture as experienced by an American in Paris, sign up for my RSS feed (but just use a compliant browser like the lastest version of Firefox for instance).