Forms of Address in Chilean Spanish

Abstract

The present investigation examines possible social and linguistic factors that influence forms of address used in Chilean Spanish with various interlocutors. A characteristic of the Spanish of Chile is the use of a variety of forms of address for the second person singular, tú, vos, and usted, with corresponding verb conjugations (Lipski 1994). Previous studies have posited that whereas the pronominal voseo is still stigmatized by Chile's middle and upper classes, the mixed verbal voseo is gaining ground among the educated sectors of the population (Torrejón 1986, 1991). The current study uses linguistic survey results taken from eighty-one residents of Santiago, Chile, to test these predictions quantitatively. The results show a V-shaped distribution of verbal voseo in terms of age and social class. Young professional-class speakers are those who report using verbal voseo most frequently. Survey data are compared to recorded and observed interactions among speakers. Interactional data suggest that the frequency of vos is underreported in the survey but that the essential pattern reported by speakers is accurate.

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