This Video is About You (if you're French, Welsh, German or Spanish-speaking)

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hi there. This video is about you, not you specifically watching this video, but the concept of you, the word you, because to someone who only speaks English, it might seem surprising, even counterintuitive, that other languages have more than one word for you, but actually out of the five languages that I know just enough about to talk about this topic, English is really the odd one out.

[00:00:28]Literally all of the others have at least two, if not more.

[00:00:32]So, I want to just kind of summarize and talk about how fascinating I find this and how not only not only, as I said, do most other languages seem to have more than one word for you, but even among those other languages, they don't seem to sort of agree on how many words for you there should be or in what situations they should be used.

[00:00:56]So, first of all, French and Welsh seem to have a pretty similar approach to you, which is there are two words. One is informal singular, so, you know, you're talking to one friend or one family member, and the other one is for plural and or formal. So, in French, this is tu and vous.

[00:01:16]Tu is singular informal, and vous, as far as I know, is formal or plural or both.

[00:01:24]So, you know, if you're talking to your boss or multiple of your bosses or multiple friends, all of that, as far as I understand, is vous in French. And similarly, in Welsh, you've got the singular informal ti and the plural formal or plural formal chi. Now, I have heard ti in Welsh, um but I don't know if that's sort of a sta- I don't know if that's part of standard Welsh or if that's just a sort of uh uh maybe a dialect thing or a kind of informal, not technically correct middle ground between chi and ti. I don't know.

[00:02:03]As far as I know, in sort of standard Welsh, it's chi and ti. However, moving on to German, things get a little bit more complicated because now there are three words for you. There's du, which is singular informal. It's very similar to tu and ti.

[00:02:21]But then there is ihr, which is plural informal.

[00:02:27]So, you can only use this when talking to multiple people, but multiple people in an informal way. So, maybe two friends or two family members or you're a primary school teacher speaking to the class. Or also generally um generally younger people in in Germany. Even if you don't know them, people my age tend to use du. And so, if if it's a plural situation, you tend to use ihr. Then, we've got Sie, which is formal, plural or singular.

[00:03:00]So, Sie in German doesn't work quite the same as vous in French and chi in Welsh because it's not used for all plurals.

[00:03:10]It's only used for formal plurals or formal singular. So, if you're talking to one boss or two bosses or, you know, you're a a a waiter in a restaurant serving one customer or two customers, you would use Sie for all of those situations. But if it's two friends, you would use ihr. Interestingly, both the pronoun Sie and the conjugation of all verbs with Sie is exactly the same for um you formal and for they, as in, you know, third person plural.

[00:03:48]Which I think derives from the the that Sie, like the formal you in quite a lot of languages, comes from a kind of a way of talking to um talking to sort of respected figures in the past in a sort of third-person indirect way as a sign of respect. Um which I'll get to in more detail in a second because it's time to talk about Spanish.

[00:04:12]Spanish in a way makes things more complicated than any of these other languages, but in a way it's also more straightforward as I'll explain. Now, I realize that whenever I talk about Spanish at this point, because of how my my audience has changed over the last couple of weeks, I'm mostly explaining this to people who know more than me about Spanish. So, please do correct me on literally anything to do with Castellano.

[00:04:40]Um same goes for German, actually. If you're watching this in your German, correct me on anything I get wrong. But, my understanding of Spanish you is in Spain, there are four words for you.

[00:04:50]Tú is singular informal.

[00:04:53]Usted is singular formal.

[00:04:55]Um vos- vosotros is plural informal and ustedes is plural formal.

[00:05:03]So, the reason I said although Spanish has more words for you than any of the other languages I know, it's also kind of more straightforward because it's every possible combination of number of people and formality is covered by one of these words. They're really specific about which you you're talking to. However, hop across the Atlantic to most of Latin America and suddenly there are only three words for you because they do not use vosotros, at least as far as I know.

[00:05:34]Um my understanding is you've still got tú and usted, but then ustedes is just used for all plurals regardless of formality. So, So, it's two friends or two of your bosses, or you're a waiter talking to two people, or it's two, you know, a hundred people, a crowd of a hundred people you're addressing, all of that is ustedes. If it's plural, it's ustedes. However, even within Latin America, there's variation in the word for you, because in Argentina, and I think maybe also Bolivia, {question mark} um the word for singular informal you is different to the rest of Latin America. It's not tú, it's vos.

[00:06:17]And not only does the pronoun change, the conjugation of the verb is different, which is why I've seen so many um Argentines in my comments recently saying things with sos.

[00:06:29]Sos un genio, which thank you very much, but also thank you for getting me used to how verbs conjugate with the pronoun vos as opposed to tú, cuz I really had next to no experience with that before I started getting loads of Argentines in my comment section. One more point which I wanted to make regarding usted, which I hinted at earlier when I was talking about the Z, is usted um demonstrates how a lot of these formal versions of you were originally a very indirect way of referring to the person you're talking to. I think usted comes from a word related to majesty. It's basically saying does your majesty want a cup of tea, or whatever you're asking.

[00:07:15]Um and that's why the the conjugations of usted and ustedes are the same as the singular and plural third person conjugations, because you literally are asking in a indirect third person way.

[00:07:32]You're not saying do you want a cup of tea, you're saying does your majesty, or do your majesties, want a cup of tea. Anyway, in conclusion, I think you are interesting.

[00:07:43]And also, if you speak any language apart from the five that I talked about here, um especially like non-European languages, I genuinely have very little idea how the word you or the concept of you works in, for example, Japanese or Mandarin or Arabic or Farsi, anything like that. So, if you have any thoughts, please tell me.