Summary
Background
Amongst present-day European languages, Standard English is slightly unusual in that it has only one form for the second person pronoun in both the singular and plural: ‘you’. The current system comes about as a result of a historical process whereby the plural form (‘ye’ or ‘you’) began to be used in the singular as a marker of respect to persons of great rank. Once this singular ‘you’ had entered the language alongside the original singular form, ‘thou’, a system of informal and formal singular second person pronouns developed, such as is still found today in French, Russian, Spanish, and German, with ‘you’ acting as a formal pronoun. Following the status in French of ‘tu’ and ‘vous’, linguists term the informal form in any language ‘T’ and the formal ‘V’.
In English however, this T/V distinction in pronoun forms was not maintained: as ‘you’ passed from being used only to persons of great rank, to being exchanged between members of the upper classes, to being given as a marker of respect to all in a position of authority (be it familial, economic, or political authority), it began to replace ‘thou’ as the most commonly used form of address. This process continued so that by 1700, ‘thou’ had virtually disappeared, leaving only the dialectal and liturgical exceptions which remain today (for the general history of the pronoun forms see Strang 1970; Barber 1976:203–13; Wales 1983; and Leith 1984 give accounts of usage specific to the early Modern period).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Authorship of Shakespeare's PlaysA Socio-linguistic Study, pp. 54 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
- 1
- Cited by