Spanish Dialects and Varieties - Grammar - Variation in Second-person Pronouns and Verbs - Second Person Plural

Second Person Plural

In Standard European Spanish the plural of tú is vosotros and the plural of usted is ustedes. In Spanish America vosotros is not used, and the plural of both tú and usted is ustedes. This means that speaking to a group of friends a Spaniard will use vosotros, while a Latin American Spanish-speaker will use ustedes. Although ustedes is semantically a second-person form, it is treated grammatically as a third-person plural form because it originates from the term vuestras mercedes ("your graces," sing. vuestra merced).

In Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Venezuela, school children are taught the conjugation of vosotros. However, it is only a formality, as they rarely if ever use vosotros in real-life situations.

The only vestiges of vosotros in America are boso/bosonan in Papiamento and the use of vuestro/a in place of sus (de ustedes) as second person plural possessive in the Cusco region of Peru.

In very formal contexts, however, the vosotros conjugation can still be found. An example is the Mexican national anthem, which contains such forms as apretad and empapad.

The plural of the Colombian (Cundi-Boyacense Plateau) sumercé is sumercés/susmercedes, from sus mercedes ("your mercies").

In some parts of Andalusia (the lands around the Guadalquivir river and western Andalusia), the usage is what is called ustedes-vosotros: the pronoun ustedes is combined with the verb forms for vosotros. However, this sounds extremely colloquial and most Andalusians prefer to use each pronoun with its correct form.

In Ladino, vosotros is still the only second person plural pronoun, since usted does not exist.