El voseo: another way to speak Spanish (III)

The pronoun vos.

In voseo regions, the pronoun vos takes on the role of the second person singular in informal contexts, displacing tú and the prepositional form ti. However, it is essential to remember that this change only affects the subject and the object of a preposition; the remaining (unstressed) pronouns stay the same as in tuteo. For example, we say ¿Vos quién sos? or Esto es para vos, but we keep te in phrases like Te lo dije (and never *Vos lo dije).

Pronominal, verbal, and complete voseo.

Voseo can be pronominal — that is, using the pronoun vos instead of tú but with tuteo verb forms (vos comes) — verbal, using tú with voseo verb forms (tú comés), or complete (vos comés). You can read more about the historical origins of voseo here, but in short it derives from the so-called Latin majestic plural, which evolved into the reverential voseo of Spanish — a form of respect that inherited plural pronouns and conjugations from Latin into the Spanish singular. As Spanish evolved, it also ceased to be a form of respect and became an informal form of address; but it is precisely this heritage that explains the changes in verb conjugation in voseo forms.

Voseo affects the conjugation of different verb tenses, always in the second person singular. The tenses most frequently affected are the present indicative and the imperative. Let us look, broadly speaking, at voseo conjugation for each of these.

Present indicative. To obtain the voseo form, we take the present indicative of the informal second person plural (vosotros habláis, vosotros coméis, vosotros vivís) and drop the -i- from the ending: vos comés, vos hablás. For third-conjugation verbs, the form stays the same: vos vivís. In Chilean voseo specifically, first-conjugation verbs drop the -s (habláis ~ hablái), second-conjugation verbs drop the -i- (coméis ~ comís), and third-conjugation verbs remain unchanged. Two very common verbs are irregular: ser (tú eres ~ vos sos, or soi in Chile) and ir (tú vas ~ vos vas, or vai in Chile).

Imperative. Building the voseo imperative is straightforward: drop the -r from the infinitive and add a written accent to the final vowel: hablar → hablá, comer → comé, vivir → viví. This rule holds even for verbs that are irregular in their tuteo form: decir: di (tú), decí (vos); tener: ten (tú), tené (vos). The verb ir has an irregular voseo imperative: it takes the form andá.

While other verb tenses can also be affected by voseo, their use is less widespread and far more specific to certain areas within voseo regions. Describing them in this article goes beyond its scope. What you should know is that if you are going to visit a voseo area, it is worth checking with a native speaker whether using voseo with strangers is appropriate or not. To give just two examples: in Uruguay, voseo is fully accepted in educated usage and is even used in formal situations, whereas in Chile it is extremely informal and using it with strangers can come across as rude. I hope this has been useful — and as always, thanks for reading!