I give up!!!!! We have Andrew, a young(ish):-) English man who feels very strongly about the traditions involved & thinks we should keep bowing & scraping, (sorry, vous & tu ing ) & my very old, dyed in the wool,100% French, boules mates & neighbours who don't give a sh*t if I vous or tu 'em!!
Yep, my neighbour and occasional beer, wine or malt pal (until we were both banned by medics) and I have used tu since the first time we shook hands. His OH took a couple of weeks, broke ice by throwing her teddy when we both had a bottle of very expensive red, then went looking for another with legs like people on a sailing ship mid-Atlantic ;-) She tu-ed us both as she gave us the six year old treatment. He got another bottle anyway :-D
All my husband's family use tu to me and me to them.
True Grahame. I occasionally read a bit of socio-linguistics, especially when I don't understand things. Such was the case earlier this year or last when a French politician threw his teddy-bear about the amount of English creeping into French. I saw a response by a professor of English at one of the universities saying it was actually a belated exchange and that the amount of French used by the English is far more than English encroachment into French. So I looked for something on that topic and sure enough the man knew what he was talking about. The difference is most of it is pre-20 century and most of the English into French is post WW2, so far too new for conservative thinkers to accept.
Language is constantly changing and generational transitions in many things are becoming shorter, so now about 20 years is seen as a normal period for mind shifts in Europe, whereby the French are little different to others but are not as fast moving as Scandinavians, for instance, who see things in terms of roughly 10 year cycles. Interesting stuff to read and interestingly the conservative mind set is much the same in all countries but shuts up quicker in some than others when they see they are losing the argument and change will come anyway.
It is! "Nice one, Andrew. Nice one, son. Nice one, Andrew, let's have another one"!
Oops & respect!!! Fair enough but don't expect me to stoke yer ego :-)
You can tug, bow & scrape all & everything you want Grahame. I'll just continue to treat people nicely if I respect them & otherwise if I don't. I certainly don't have to continually tell people I respect them & life is much simpler that way ;-)
My daughter is in CM1 and her maitresse explained this year as they are now getting older they must vouvouie as they are no longer babies!
nice one Terry (could be a song that...!) we have several "mec" customers who I tutoie and they me tutoient but vouvoient my OH...! comme t'as dit, c'est un truc de mec !
ah SIL - son-in-law - then they're doing the right thing "vouvoying" you, as we all do in our extremely relaxed family, that's just the way it is à la campagne...!
I used to vouvouie in lycée and collège and tutoie at the IUT and primaire. Something to do with ados for me - I needed to keep them at arm's length :-O
I refrained froim throwing that one in but well done, Véro. It's also so easy for anglophones to forget just what a minefield English is as a foreign language :-O
A friend, who's possibly even older than me, asked me if he could use tu because we'd known each other for several years. I said of course he could. But when my wife, who's French, said he could also use tu when talking to her he said he couldn't possibly, he'd feel too uncomfortable, it went against all he'd been taught as a lad about respect for women. My wife wasn't offended because she'd had the same upbringing and could understand his reasons perfectly. So entre mecs on se tutoie but that doesn't necessarily extend to the mec's wife! In my case it didn't extend to the wife's husband. I'd known and worked with her on and off for years and we automatically used tu but I'd never met her husband. The first time I did, I used tu to him -- precisely once! The look of horror on his face told me all I needed to know.
"I'm willing to bet that vouiement is virtually dead in 20 years."
Oh I do hope it's sooner than that. I have previously expressed my opinion of this anachronism. I think it's a load of nonsense dreamed up by people who think they have an entitlement to respect which in most cases is not deserved. One can show respect by many means other than this.
It also makes a language damned hard to learn:-)
My mother, who has been to and fro France for years, and lived there for a while, says it's more complicated now than it used to be. In the past, if you were on first name terms with someone, you would usually be fine with tu, whereas if they were M or Mme (or Mlle) then vous was expected. Nowadays it seems that first names are used much more widely but the use of tu hasn't quite caught up. So someone you know as Jean-Paul may well expect you to address him as vous.
Tu among work colleagues of the same 'rank' is usual but vous to someone senior - except in my penfriend's case! Her first work experience was in London, where everyone was, of course, you; when she then started work in France she translated this as tu across the board. It's brought her some odd looks, and mutterings behind her back, but mostly she says it's helped working relations.
Italy is just as bad, by the way - especially when it's a business relationship. My friend there tried to explain it to me. He said you should call your doctor vous but for 'lower classes' it would depend how well you knew them. Your builder might be offended if you said tu (thinking you were talking down to him) but, then again, if you said voi he might think you were taking the p***!
Personally, I always love it when someone I know (and like) spontaneously calls me tu. But I still find it hard to tutoie friends of my parents' generation - even those I've known for ever. My conclusion, based on experience, is that vous may seem slightly distant but it will rarely offend (and being told to please use tu is a nice, positive thing). On the other hand, tu in the wrong place can very easily offend - and probably won't be corrected by the person themselves, allowing you to go on insulting them completely unawares. Real friends don't mind either way, so if in doubt, go for vous.
In English we all say vous to everyone anyway ;-) I haven't noticed any thee-ing and thou-ing here or indeed anywhere else in real life!
I tutoie my pupils & wouldn't dream of saying vous to them - I speak to them as I would to my own children. But then I'm OLD. Youthful teachers are advised to vouvoie their pupils to maintain distance. Take it as a compliment you were advised to vouvoie them ;-)
It's a tough, sometimes grating on the nerves one. I am older than my OH so people vous me and tu her, she vous most people which is the Romande habit in Fribourg. Fribourg is also bilingual and I use either Hochdeutsch or Berlin dialect according to who I am talking to, they only Sie, whereas I Du most of the time. Dutzen is not taken with offence but to use tu is when speaking French. So I get in a mess in that part of Switzerland. Anyway, she has brought her vous habit with her, even to people we are quite friendly with. I am allowed to tu most of those people, age I suppose, and there we are together talking to the same people - her using vous, me using tu.
Young people seem to be using tu more than they used to or at least as I was taught. I say good, Italians and Spanish have done that extensively which pleases me no end, many parts of Germany have, well not Bavaria at all, the Dutch and Belgians have all but dropped the habit, so perhaps France will get there and make life easier for those of us who dither, which I do in the face of these things.
absolutely, things get ugly pretty quickly if you start letting them te tutoient !
Another profession where tutoiement is, or at least was, de rigueur is journalism. I learned how to decide when to use tu and vous during a year as an English language assistant at a school in Lozere. So when I hit Paris in 1967 as a pretty green news agency journalist I automatically used vous to French colleagues from other organisations. I was swiftly told to use tu and that to stick with vous would be considered very stand-offish. That doesn't mean, however, that I would have used tu to the editor or another senior member of staff. The art was in knowing at what level tu became vous.
As to kids and teachers using tu to each other, my wife, a former teacher, has hysterics when she hears children using their teacher's first name and addressing them as tu. She blames it all on 1968 when the old educational order was thrown out before anyone had decided what to replace it. The use of tu was supposed to create a camaraderie or complicity between teacher and pupil which in turn was supposed to improve the learning experience. What it certainly did was wreck any authority the teacher had over the pupils.