Dear reader: Once I sat down to write this post I realized that I had plenty to say about voseo as a linguistic phenomenon. So I’ve restricted myself to that topic here. In my next post I’ll actually tell you about my enjoyment of voseo while in Argentina.

My favorite aspect of Argentinian Spanish is voseo, the use of the pronoun vos instead of tú to mean ‘you’ in familiar settings. As a linguist, I appreciate voseo for three reasons.

First, voseo has an amazing history. Argentina, along with certain other regions in Central and South America, retained the archaic vos pronoun while the rest of Latin America followed Spain’s lead in settling on tú. The outcome of tú versus vos in each region depended on the degree of contact between it and Spain during the colonial period. Argentina could not be reached directly, via the Atlantic, because rampant piracy in the Atlantic forced Spain to restrict ocean travel. Spaniards could only reach Argentina by sailing to the Caribbean, crossing the Isthmus of Panama via mule train, sailing to a Pacific port such as Lima, and crossing the Andes. Argentina, like other effectively remote parts of the New World, was thus insulated from linguistic changes back in Spain.

I remember how excited I was to read about this connection between Latin American linguistic history and piracy (!!!) in Ralph Penny’s essential A History of the Spanish Language. It was the subject of my first blog post more than ten years ago, and was one of two linguistic insights that inspired me to write my first book. (The other was my spotting of Jespersen’s Cycle at work in the creation of Spanish negatives, both old and new.)

Second, voseo helps to illustrate that linguistic complexity begets variation. When English speakers begin to study Spanish, they are often taken aback to learn that our single pronoun you corresponds to at least three in Spanish: singular tú (informal) and usted (formal), and plural ustedes. Spain further divides plural ‘you’ into informal vosotros and formal ustedes. As is often the case, the complexity of this aspect of the language is paralleled by extensive dialectal variation: not just vosotros in Spain and vos in parts of Latin America, but also differences in how speakers around the world use tú and usted. For example, Spaniards favor tú over usted in all but the most formal of situations, and in parts of Columbia usted connotes intimacy.

(By the way, two other examples of complexity begetting variation in Spanish are (i) its inventory of seven third person direct and indirect object pronouns (lo, la, los, las, le, les, and se), which has spawned the variant usage patterns of leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo, and (ii) its relative abundance of consonants (17-19, depending on dialect), as opposed to vowels (5), with the result that most phonetic variation in Spanish dialects involves consonants.)

Third — I’m perhaps going out on a limb here — voseo is something that most Spanish speakers are aware of. As a result, you can start an interesting conversation about language differences by asking a Spanish speaker ¿En su país se usa tú o vos? Likewise, you can ask about usage of tú versus usted in their country. I can’t think of any aspect of English grammar that could inspire a parallel discussion. We’re stuck with matter-of-fact questions about vocabulary, such as “Do you say soda, pop, or coke?”