Actually thee and thou were originally the singular form and were anything but formal until they started being used solely for the deity! In e.g. Yorkshire, when I was growing up, thee and thou were still the familiar forms (and also used to be particularly point when people were angry)
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I stand corrected 
I suppose, as a Yorkshireman myself I should have thought more carefully how they were used by older folk when I was growing up - though they have pretty much fallen out of use even back home these days.
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I might just wear a badge saying I’m a friendly Tahitian… 
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Ah, I see the reason for my confusion
From the Wikipedia article.
I did once tutoyer a French army general but fortunately he took it with good grace. I just explained I was Scottish and everyone’s your mate in 5 minutes. 
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I had an internship with a company in the Languedoc in 2012. I pretty much ‘vouvoyered’ everyone on the basis that (a) they were strangers to me and (b) they were all senior to me in terms of their position in the company. This seemed to me like the right thing to do. On my third day, my supervisor took me aside and told me to ‘tutoyer’ everyone in the company except M. le Directeur, should I ever meet him. I never met him, but I ‘tutoyered’ everyone else there from that day until the end of my internship.
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Thou is tu, thee is toi, thy is ton and le tien is thine 
This explains why in English verbs what is now the 2nd person singular looks like a plural
I AM We ARE
Thou ART You ARE
He IS They ARE
Much better to speak like a 17thC pirate and just put be everywhere.
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I don’t know how old you are Angela, but my experience until the late '90s of living on the Notts/Derbys border involved many people using ‘thou’ or ‘tha’. Yorkshire too. I once was required to reverse to a warehouse dock with limited lateral space in Barnsley. The man stopped me and said ‘Owd’l’ha oppen tha doooers?’ I felt embarrassed not understanding because I knew he was speaking English but eventually got it ‘How would you open your doors?’ He thought there wasn’t enough space and perhaps I should open them before I started to reverse. He was wrong, they were bifold doors and I knew what I was doing but it did amuse me that if I had been in France and been asked that in French I would have understood immediately.
Also @vero is quite right, ‘you’ in English is the plural form of thou, I wish somebody would tell those people, mainly in Liverpool and Glasgow, that and that they don’t have to put an ‘s’ on the end to make it so. 
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It could be worse. German has a familiar plural, “Ihr”.
How about “ye”? Is that formal or familiar?
Except where it’s “yous” or “yees”.
I’m sure there are other alternatives.
A little bit younger than you David! (But not massively so…)
Old English ge, nominative plural of 2nd person pronoun þu (see thou); cognate with Old Frisian ji, Old Saxon gi, Middle Dutch ghi, Dutch gij. Cognate with Lithuanian jūs, Sanskrit yuyam, Avestan yuzem, Greek hymeis.
Altered, by influence of we, from an earlier form that was similar to Gothic jus “you (plural)” (see you). The -r- in Old Norse er, German ihr probably is likewise from influence of their respective 1st person plural pronouns (Old Norse ver, German wir).
So it’s the plural of “thou” (familiar), technically. If I have understood the explanation properly!!
(Memo to self: brush up my Old Frisian)
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Isn’t tutoying just the same as being on first name terms? If you use a person’s first name, you tutoie them.
Evidently not, since she has been Francine and I’ve been Sue from day one.
If you really want to know… ask the person concerned…
I think her actions speak louder than any words - I sent her an email saying tu, she sent back an email saying vous.
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so stick with the status quo… you write tu and she writes vous
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Bizarrely, no!
At least, not in my experience.
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Not at all. There are many people I am on first name terms with but would never dream of using tu.
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I’d have to be sleeping with someone to use “Tu” . Even then I’m not sure.
Though, however, I get an awful lot of emails from retailers (IKEA being a prime example but others too) that are calling me “Tu”. I just put it down to them trying to be right-on trendy. Along with the trend for everyone to call each other “Tu” in workplaces, which for me with most senior management and big age gaps just comes across as fake.
In none of the languages I speak would I ever use “Tu” with someone, without being invited to, And then I’d probably lapse back to “Vous” from time to time. As someone whose native language and culture is clearly not French I don’t think tutoieing anyone is my decision to make.
To animals I do “Tu” though (though still “Vous” first with children though I think many would just go straight to "Tu"with them). And I think I’ve used “Tu” a couple of times with adults to be deliberately insulting.
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