In “normative” Spanish, there are two second-person singular personal pronouns: tú and usted. The former is used as a familiar form of address, while the latter is reserved for more formal contexts, or as a form of... [ view full abstract ]
In “normative” Spanish, there are two second-person singular personal pronouns: tú and usted. The former is used as a familiar form of address, while the latter is reserved for more formal contexts, or as a form of respect. In much of Latin America, however, the pronoun vos is employed instead of (or in addition to) tú, with implications throughout the morphology (e.g. different verb endings). Quite a number of authors have have documented, classified, and analyzed this so-called voseo, focusing on particular varieties of Spanish or presenting an overview of the larger dialectological map. However, these researchers have been largely unconcerned with the number of speakers who participate in the phenomenon. Only recently have claims begun to appear about the number of voseantes, but they range wildly from something like 80 million to 250 million speakers.
The current study fills that gap in the linguistic demography through what is, as far as we know, the first-ever census of the voseo, carried out in 2017. We triangulate official and unofficial population estimates, survey data, and information gleaned from follow-up interviews in order to arrive at reasonable figures for the number of speakers who participate—at different levels of productivity and proficiency and in various morphological, lexical, and pragmatic configurations—in this Hispanic American dialectological phenomenon. Our methodology takes into consideration speaker attitudes, the pitfalls of self-reported data, rapidly changing demographics, and the polymorphous nature of the voseo itself. Of particular interest are the morphological differences across dialects (e.g. hablás vs. hablas vs. hablái[s] ‘you speak’) and pragmatic variation within communities (e.g. hables vs. hablés in negative imperatives), subjected here to a fine-grained analysis.
We provide calculations for all of Spain and the Americas, where we find fully 1/3 of the Spanish speakers to be voseantes. As with any project of this type, we also learned things that were never anticipated in the original design of the study. Such findings contribute to a more thorough and nuanced reading of the complex nature of the phenomenon.
