Spanish in Latin America. El Voseo

When we are teaching a language like Spanish, there are a series of topics that we should keep in mind. The interculturality, wealth and diversity of the language are fundamental elements that we have to include in our program of courses and classes.

Interestingly, teachers often “skip over” the topic of “EL VOSEO”. If at any moment in your teaching career you have turned to a story about the famous Mafalda or if you have prepared a classroom activity with music by Calamaro, Jorge Drexler or any of the great musicians of the Cono Sur (Southern Cone) region; if you've shown in the classroom an Argentinean, Uruguayan or Paraguayan movie or short film, then you have surely encountered this phenomenon.

A linguistic phenomenon in Latin America

When our students are interested in the culture of the South American continent, or if they go and travel there, or simply as an important linguistic phenomenon that marks the accent of many millions of speakers and that the Royal Spanish Academy includes in their dictionary (consult the Academy’s online dictionary and you will see how the conjugation of the verbs offers “vos” as an alternative to “tú”); it’s important that this phenomenon doesn’t transform into yet another tense to memorize, but that we try to see a certain logic behind the phenomenon, which additionally will help with our understanding and will strengthen the sentiment in the memory of the student better than if it is simply a matter of he or she thinking, well if the teacher says so, I’ll repeat it but I don’t understand it.  

The impact on the tense of the verb

It’s fundamentally important to remember that “EL VOSEO” is a phenomenon that consists of the exchange of the pronoun TÚ for VOS, but it doesn’t stop there: “EL VOSEO” also affects the tense of the verb, in the Present Indicative and the Imperative.  

I like to take the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone when the question of “EL VOSEO” presents itself. Then, we reflect on the subject as a group – the students and I, with some discrete manipulation on my part to ensure that the conversation is steered in the direction that I wish it to go – The situation usually goes a little something like this:

When the Spaniards colonized South America, respect for indigenous languages was not very important. The colonizers simply imposed their own language upon the enslaved (who already had their own languages). In this way, we can extract an idea that, historically correct or not, helps us to understand why and how we use “EL VOSEO”. For centuries, Americans had to use Castilian to talk with Spanish people. Evidently, this was a relationship built upon subservience. In this way, the “TÚ” form was practically unused by the Americans as they did not utilize the Castilian language to communicate with their own people, but their own indigenous language, whatever it was. In this way, the “TÚ” form in the singular and the “VOSOTROS” form in the plural were forgotten about. In fact, in almost all of Latin America, “VOSOTROS” is hardly ever used. “USTEDES” is used in the second and third person plural and in formal situations.

In the case of the second person singular, we can imagine that, with the passing of the centuries, many Americans, in many regions of their respective countries, stopped using their own original languages and decided to speak Spanish instead. In this case, yes, they would need to utilize the “TÚ” form, but we say that they had forgotten because of a lack of practice. This is what Alex Grijelmo calls “EL GENIO DE LA LENGUA”, this unconscious collective use of language based on common sense that leads speakers to unconsciously repeat language as it is used around them. They observe that the only apparent difference between “ÉL” and “ELLOS” is the presence of the letter “N”. Equally, the difference between “TÚ” and “VOSOTROS” is that the plural form has an “I” and the singular form does not. So, they adopted a new form that wasn’t “TÚ” but “VOS” (in memory of the obligatory courteousness with jefes españoles).

What they didn’t notice is that the form of “VOSOTROS”, in present indicative and in imperative, has an accent on the last syllable, while the singular forms of the same verbs carry the accent on the root.

In this way, we can understand how the “TÚ HABLAS” turns into “VOS HABLÁS” through the art of “EL VOSEO” (and in this case, the accent is necessary). We can also understand that the order: “¡VEN!” logically transforms into “¡VENÍ!” in that the “D” that characterizes the imperative of “VOSOTROS” disappears and we obtain an imperative of the perfectly regular “VOS” that we hear in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and many other zones over the entire length and breadth of Central and Southern America.