Subject pronouns in Spanish: tú, vos, usted and more

In summary, the subject pronouns in Spanish are the following:

1st person singular: yo (I).

2nd person singular: tú (you, informal), vos (you, informal), usted (you, formal).

3rd person singular: él (he), ella (she).

1st person plural: nosotros (we, masculine), nosotras (we, feminine).

2nd person plural: vosotros (you all, masculine, informal), vosotras (you all, feminine, informal), ustedes (you all, formal).

3rd person plural: ellos (they, masculine), ellas (they, feminine).

Tú, vos and usted: yes, there are 3 subject pronouns for the 2nd person singular. Tú is informal register and is the most standard, to define it somehow. It is used in Spain, in many countries of Hispanic America and in Equatorial Guinea, the only African country that has Spanish as an official language. Being informal register it is used with people you are close to: tú eres mi amigo (you are my friend). Usted is formal register, it is the respectful form. It is used with strangers, in formal situations or with older people. The verbal conjugation changes when using usted: it coincides with that of the third person singular. Usted es una persona muy amable (you are a very kind person). Vos is informal register and is used to address people you are close to, mainly in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and countries of Central America, although it is also used less widely in other Latin American countries. It also implies changes in verbal conjugation that vary by country. The use of the pronoun vos, a linguistic phenomenon called voseo, has a very interesting historical origin: here you can read more about this origin, here about the prestige of voseante forms and their geographical distribution and here about the verbal conjugation of these forms.

Vosotros, vosotras, ustedes: these pronouns are used to address a group of people: they are the second person plural pronouns. The forms vosotros and vosotras are informal register and are used only in Spain. Vosotros is used to address a group of men or a group of men and women, and vosotras to address a group composed exclusively of women, since in Spanish the masculine grammatical gender is the unmarked gender. The same applies to the masculine pronouns nosotros and ellos. This is the current convention of the Spanish language, although as in other languages there are discussions on the matter. Ustedes is formal register in Spain, and is the second person plural pronoun used throughout Hispanic America in both formal and informal situations, that is, in Spain ustedes is used in formal situations and in Hispanic America ustedes is used in any situation. The verbal conjugation changes: the vosotros/as form has its own conjugation, vosotros habláis español (you all speak Spanish), while that of ustedes coincides with the third person plural: ustedes hablan español (you all speak Spanish).

Nosotros, nosotras: this is the first person plural, that is, it is used to refer to a group of people that includes the speaker. The form nosotros refers to a group composed of men or of men and women, nosotras refers to a group composed exclusively of women.

Ellos, ellas: this is the third person plural. As in the previous cases, ellos refers to a group of men or a group of men and women, while ellas refers to a group formed exclusively by women.

Subject omission: a very common phenomenon in Spanish, unlike other languages, is that the grammatical subject often does not appear explicitly in the sentence. Throughout different articles on the blog we will look at verbal conjugation in Spanish: this conjugation is quite complex and implies that verbal endings carry a lot of information, so making the subject explicit is in many cases redundant. Let us look at some examples.

(Yo) hablo español (I speak Spanish): the most natural way to say this is without the pronoun, that is, hablo español, since the form hablo only coincides with the first person singular yo.

(Nosotros) vivimos en Madrid (we live in Madrid): again, what you will most frequently hear is vivimos en Madrid, because the form vivimos already shows that we are several people and that I am one of them.

Something that applies to subject omission but also to many other aspects of linguistics is the rule of economy of language: naturally, people try to convey messages with the fewest possible words. From this it follows that when we do not omit something that could be omitted, it is because we are adding another meaning to the message. Thus, in Spanish the subject is made explicit, for example, to give emphasis, to contrast, to avoid ambiguities with conjugated verb forms that coincide, etc.

These lines aim to be, nothing more, a brief introduction to the Spanish language. I want you to take away, in summary, this information: there are pronouns that have a formal and an informal form, others that have a masculine and a feminine form, and that the grammatical subject is frequently omitted in the language. Thank you for reading!