Singular Pronouns In Spanish

There are three forms of second person singular pronouns in Spanish: usted, tu and vos. Usted is the formal personal pronoun used to show respect and tu and vos are both familiar personal pronouns in Spanish, however the use of vos (voseo) and tu (tuteo) vary according to destination. Although virtually absent in Spain, the United States and the majority of the Caribbean, voseo is used extensively across both Central and South America where it is used by an estimated 40% of Spanish speakers. Voseo is a result of levelling, described as ‘The common adoption of a feature which then became a stereotype of Latin American speech’ in Pountain’s Exploring the Spanish Language (2003, p.158). As further explained below, voseo was originally found mainly
In early Old Castilian, vos continued it’s double usage from late Latin as both a second person plural and polite second person singular, however when used as a plural, vos would frequently be followed by otros (others) and over time agglutination (defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as ‘the formation of words from morphemes that retain their original forms and meanings with little change during the combination process’ (2015)) resulted in the modern second person plural pronoun vosotros.

Around the 15th and 16th centuries the use of vos had expanded so much that it had lost much of its deferential value, and was used ‘when through a great familiarity among friends, or speaking to God’ as found in the example ‘O Dios, sois vos mi Padre verdadero, O God, thou art my true father; Tu eres un buen amigo, Thou art a good friend’ from the book A New Spanish Grammar: Or, The Elements Of The Spanish Language (Pueyo 1792). As this example shows, vos and tu could be used in the same sentence to refer to the same person, representing the equal meaning and loss of vos’s deferential
These verb forms were paraoxytonic (stress placed on the penultimate vowel). However from the fourteenth century onwards this intervocalic /d/ was gradually eliminated as a result of merging of singular and plural as well as deferential and non deferential usage. Consequently a hiatus was formed which was resolved by the coexistence of two different verb endings - assimilated verb endings (voseo monoptongado) and dissimilated verb endings (voseo