Living abroad, I'm often asked to explain my own cultural identity and linguistic heritage. Sometimes I'm sure people wish they'd never asked when I answer them with: "I was born in England, near Liverpool, although I spent all but the first two years of my life growing up in Wales." This then opens the floodgates for more questions: "Do you speak Welsh?" "No, I gave up Welsh at school when I was 14, having been advised not to study three foreign languages (with German and French) and thus limit my skills set." "Do you feel Welsh or English?" "Well, I'm English by birth but I do support Welsh sports teams and others – especially in the face of English domination." Thankfully my Swiss colleagues, unlike former colleagues elsewhere, do understand that Wales is not "just another part of England". Linguistic and cultural pluralism in the UK is probably more acceptable to the Swiss, on account of their own country's multilingual landscape.
I've always been interested in the status of the Welsh language and even wrote an assignment about English/Welsh bilingualism for my Linguistics MA, drawing mainly on the research of Professor Colin Baker at the University of Bangor. Back then, Gwynedd was the area of Wales with the highest concentration of Welsh speakers – above 60%. Fast-forward a decade or so, and the 2011 Census reveals a slight decline in Gwynedd (56%) as well as a slight decline across Wales as a whole – with 19% of the Welsh population over the age of three now indicating that they can speak Welsh.
Against this background, I read of a recent incident where police were called to a shop in Pwllheli, Gwynedd, where a native Welsh speaker, Dr Robin Lewis, was angry that the shop assistant would not tell him his bill in Welsh, only English. Although the Welsh Language Act 1993 serves to put the Welsh language on an equal footing with English where the public sector (e.g. in councils, public bodies and road signage) is concerned, I'm not sure that there is a legal requirement covering its use in shops. This particular case is interesting because the shop assistant concerned was able to speak Welsh but, for whatever reason, chose not to. When the police were called, the first officer was not a Welsh speaker and so needed back-up. The situation was only resolved when another shop assistant conducted the entire transaction in Welsh – to the satisfaction of the customer.
This raises several questions, and I'd be interested to hear the views of people living in Wales. Does the non-compliant shop assistant belong to a subset of the 56% of Welsh speakers in Gwynedd – i.e. a smaller group of people who can speak Welsh but who don't? Was the customer right to insist that the Welsh language be used in this situation? Is this an isolated incident or a more widespread occurrence? Is it a further sign of a decline in the use of Welsh or simply a storm in a teacup?
Sunday, 30 December 2012
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Bonjour, Monsieur Barton!
Not being a fan of football, I'd never felt compelled to write about it in relation to language – until now. This is because today we learn of Liverpool-born footballer Joey Barton, currently on a 12-month stint in Marseille, has seemingly adopted a French accent in his own speech and, by extension, the speech patterns of native French people when they speak English. C'est incroyable, ne c'est pas? Well, when you listen to the clip of him speaking, it's not incredible at all; it's perfectly understandable. And that's the point!
The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.
Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood.
Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:
"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"
Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.
"that"
Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).
"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."
Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!
But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.
The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.
Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood.
Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:
"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"
Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.
"that"
Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).
"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."
Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!
But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.
Saturday, 17 November 2012
A word in your year
With apologies for the slight hiatus, I return with news of the UK Word of the Year for 2012 – as chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary (usually Susie Dent and her colleagues). Now, the first thing to notice about this year's winner, omnishambles, as well as all the others that were in the running – Eurogeddon, Mobot, green-on-blue, Games makers, medal or podium (used as verbs) and second screening – is that the name of the award itself is telling. In most cases, these words will mean precisely nothing outside of a specifically UK context.
Omnishambles in particular appears to have emerged victorious despite its incredibly limited usage. Coined in the script of the British TV satire The Thick Of It, the word is defined as:
'a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations'.
Don't you just love the way the OED doggedly sticks to its -iz spellings, by the way? Anyway, as a British-made show (the US remake was abandoned), users of the word must surely be confined to fans of that show. The term was also used in the UK House of Commons in April 2012 in criticism of the budget, and in a further portmanteau coinage Romneyshambles – betraying one UK perspective on the US presidential election and its now defeated candidate. But in my view, these instances confirm the term's status as a niche word; much more ephemeral than the 12 months that the Word of the Year tag implies.
We should avoid attaching too much significance to what is, by the OED's own admission, a rather subjective epithet. Other neologisms will gradually gain currency and enter the dictionary on account of their widespread usage. The Word of the Year is chosen by a group of lexicographers sat around a table. As such, you could be forgiven for thinking that their choice is an attempt to impose their own interpretation of the zeitgeist on the rest of us. From the point of view of the term's intended meaning, the choice is also a strange one. Was 2012 really so bad?
If so, then surely Eurogeddon should be at the top of the pile, as uncertainty in the UK and Europe continues the longer the EU crisis persists. Choosing a word used to define anything at the extremes of human expression also means that word will quickly become moribund. If a greater catastrophe occurs next week, then we quickly have to find a new term to signify this latest nadir. Omnishambles will no longer be up to the job. This is exactly what happens with slang and youth language – where existing terms quickly lose their function as identity markers or intensity markers and are superseded by new terms. Just think of all the mild profanities that are now commonplace but would, at the very least, have earned you a clip round the ear in decades gone by!
Omnishambles in particular appears to have emerged victorious despite its incredibly limited usage. Coined in the script of the British TV satire The Thick Of It, the word is defined as:
'a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations'.
Don't you just love the way the OED doggedly sticks to its -iz spellings, by the way? Anyway, as a British-made show (the US remake was abandoned), users of the word must surely be confined to fans of that show. The term was also used in the UK House of Commons in April 2012 in criticism of the budget, and in a further portmanteau coinage Romneyshambles – betraying one UK perspective on the US presidential election and its now defeated candidate. But in my view, these instances confirm the term's status as a niche word; much more ephemeral than the 12 months that the Word of the Year tag implies.
We should avoid attaching too much significance to what is, by the OED's own admission, a rather subjective epithet. Other neologisms will gradually gain currency and enter the dictionary on account of their widespread usage. The Word of the Year is chosen by a group of lexicographers sat around a table. As such, you could be forgiven for thinking that their choice is an attempt to impose their own interpretation of the zeitgeist on the rest of us. From the point of view of the term's intended meaning, the choice is also a strange one. Was 2012 really so bad?
If so, then surely Eurogeddon should be at the top of the pile, as uncertainty in the UK and Europe continues the longer the EU crisis persists. Choosing a word used to define anything at the extremes of human expression also means that word will quickly become moribund. If a greater catastrophe occurs next week, then we quickly have to find a new term to signify this latest nadir. Omnishambles will no longer be up to the job. This is exactly what happens with slang and youth language – where existing terms quickly lose their function as identity markers or intensity markers and are superseded by new terms. Just think of all the mild profanities that are now commonplace but would, at the very least, have earned you a clip round the ear in decades gone by!
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
The difference between right and wrong
I recently
discovered an interesting debate, printed in the New York Times, about correct
language. One writer was a prescriptivist – a grammarian with a
strict approach to the subject; his adversary was a descriptivist – a linguist less
interested in righting wrongs and more concerned with simply documenting
usages. Perhaps you don't lose sleep over the correct use of which or that
in relative clauses. You may not care about the contentious assertion that
native speakers generally do not make mistakes (Trudgill & Andersson, 1992). But
when you encounter someone else's error, your reaction may determine how
much of a pedant you are.
An old university friend – a fellow linguist – is a writer, editor and proof-reader of English. In contrast, as an English teacher and translator, I inhabit the no-man's land between English and German. So although we both deal with words daily; our work is significantly different. Whereas my friend may despair at her compatriot's inability to construct a coherent English sentence; when I am proofreading texts or corporate style guides written in English by non-native writers, I may encounter the following:
1. Speech marks when "no-one" is speaking
Linguistic
pedantry is based on a shared, educated yet often nebulous perception of
correctness, which is often used to humiliate others. The prescriptivist's
value judgements concerning a trangressor's intelligence will fuel their
indignation; whereas the descriptivist will acknowledge the need for a standard
form despite supporting linguistic variation. Though when grammarians break
their own rules (see the New York Times piece); when institutions create
their own style guides and when no single dictionary enjoys universal
authority; this standard form starts to slip. Everyone becomes his or
her own authority – a situation that may have been exacerbated by the
decision in 2010 not to print the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It's why
the army of lesser Lynne Trusses will begin their
prescriptivist rants on message boards with "I was always taught that
... " or "I've always been led to believe that ...",
deflecting any scrutiny that may threaten their self-righteousness. An idiot
with an idiolect is becoming an increasingly
potent force.
An old university friend – a fellow linguist – is a writer, editor and proof-reader of English. In contrast, as an English teacher and translator, I inhabit the no-man's land between English and German. So although we both deal with words daily; our work is significantly different. Whereas my friend may despair at her compatriot's inability to construct a coherent English sentence; when I am proofreading texts or corporate style guides written in English by non-native writers, I may encounter the following:
1. Speech marks when "no-one" is speaking
2. «Guillemets to denote speech or
emphasis, though these are not used in English»
3. Ampersands everywhere (&), even
when there's not a firm of solicitors in sight
4. A mix
of the grammatical and typographical markers of both British and American
English
Of course
it's down to me to correct errors and to strive for consistency – and I love my
job! But however you view these errors, without a shared perception of
correctness, I cannot castigate a non-native English writer for making them. We
now live in an online world where in English – as in other languages – language
varieties respect arbitrary national boundaries less than they ever did. So we
now have to acknowledge variation and renegotiate shared notions of correctness
and the standard varieties required for effective communication.
Saturday, 22 September 2012
All apologies
Sorry seems to be the easiest word, lately. Everyone's apologising. If you're reading this in the UK, surely you must have noticed. Last week, following the damning conclusions published by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, we witnessed the editor of The Sun newspaper in the UK, Dominic Mohan, rightly issue an apology on the newspaper's website as he expressed sorrow for the tabloid's inaccurate reporting of the 1989 disaster at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield. The Prime Minister also later apologised on behalf of the nation.
This week we also saw the Sheffield MP and the UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said sorry for breaking his election pledge to oppose increases in university tuition fees. His broadcast was then satirised in the form of a song. You can even download the song as a charity single and listen to Clegg's autotuned apologies to your heart's content. Then we also discovered that on Wednesday, another MP, Andrew Mitchell, had allegedly sworn at a policeman and had called him a pleb. Typical of their journalistic restraint, The Sun – who first reported the story – even indicated the preceding profanity in print. The BBC and others were less explicit, though the damage had already been done.
As indicated in a previous blog post, we now live in an age where, thanks to the permanence of the Internet, every ephemeral faux pas and many grave errors can be replayed ad infinitum. As a result, the general public as well as the political and media elite are becoming more aware of how acts of contrition are received. And while they may not be familiar with Brown and Levinson's work in Linguistics on politeness (including an examination of the apology); I believe people are becoming increasingly able to tell the difference between a sincere apology and a PR stunt or a damage limitation exercise. In turn, this increased level of scrutiny concerning the genuine sincerity behind an apology now frequently leads to it being rejected – by either the wronged party or by others (the public at large) who, at least in the first instance, were not the intended recipient of the apology.
In my opinion, this is the case with Andrew Mitchell MP. In days gone by, he would have apologised sincerely to the policeman concerned and then to his boss (the PM) – both of which he has now done. That would've been the end of the matter. But these days, only a resignation or a sacking will suffice. Clearly every case has to be assessed on its own merits; though as we watch these sorry sagas from the sidelines, we are only satisfied when our preferred form of punishment is meted out.
This week we also saw the Sheffield MP and the UK Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, said sorry for breaking his election pledge to oppose increases in university tuition fees. His broadcast was then satirised in the form of a song. You can even download the song as a charity single and listen to Clegg's autotuned apologies to your heart's content. Then we also discovered that on Wednesday, another MP, Andrew Mitchell, had allegedly sworn at a policeman and had called him a pleb. Typical of their journalistic restraint, The Sun – who first reported the story – even indicated the preceding profanity in print. The BBC and others were less explicit, though the damage had already been done.
As indicated in a previous blog post, we now live in an age where, thanks to the permanence of the Internet, every ephemeral faux pas and many grave errors can be replayed ad infinitum. As a result, the general public as well as the political and media elite are becoming more aware of how acts of contrition are received. And while they may not be familiar with Brown and Levinson's work in Linguistics on politeness (including an examination of the apology); I believe people are becoming increasingly able to tell the difference between a sincere apology and a PR stunt or a damage limitation exercise. In turn, this increased level of scrutiny concerning the genuine sincerity behind an apology now frequently leads to it being rejected – by either the wronged party or by others (the public at large) who, at least in the first instance, were not the intended recipient of the apology.
In my opinion, this is the case with Andrew Mitchell MP. In days gone by, he would have apologised sincerely to the policeman concerned and then to his boss (the PM) – both of which he has now done. That would've been the end of the matter. But these days, only a resignation or a sacking will suffice. Clearly every case has to be assessed on its own merits; though as we watch these sorry sagas from the sidelines, we are only satisfied when our preferred form of punishment is meted out.
Saturday, 15 September 2012
Lessons in life
Sometimes events change us and shift our focus onto issues and people that may not feature prominently in our thoughts in any normal week. But this last week has been anything but normal. On Monday I was asked to buy ingredients and then oversee (with four students) the preparation and cooking of enough fish pies and vegetable pies to feed our small school on Thursday. I'd never cooked for 20+ people before, so today's blog entry was due to be called 'Hey, bring me more fish!', and would record the benefits of task-based language learning as we put our culinary skills to the test – completely through the medium of English.
So on Thursday morning I made my way to school for a morning of cooking. I was psyched up; I knew who was doing what and by when. The meal was a triumph, as evidenced by one girl who needed the English translation of the word meaning to scrape off, enabling her to ensure that none of the residual mashed potato or fish bits would be thrown away. But these events had been tempered earlier by the shocking news that a former colleague (a fellow language teacher) had died. It was decided that the school would be closed on Friday morning so that as a team, all members of staff could go to the funeral, joined by older students who wished to attend. I was moved when, during the service, my late colleague's husband and her sisters played one of my favourite pieces of music – the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major. The service was conducted bilingually in German and French and it was respectful.
And as we left the church to return to school, the head asked what food we had with us for lunch. Well, there was one fish pie left in the fridge – we'd made 10 pies altogether. There was some mashed potato left... and some bread. With the addition of some cheese, we then had enough for a shared meal. Eleven of us ate at the staff table and discussed, in English, everything from weekend plans to fairy tales that I'd never heard of. The rule for everyone at school is that English is the medium of communication when I'm around.
The culture at the school is non-hierarchical. Everyone addresses each other by their first name. Pupils and staff work in mutually supportive ways to reach group objectives as well as personal goals. This is very different from my own schooling in the UK. When was the last time you cooked a meal with your teachers/pupils to feed the whole school? When was the last time you had a communal meal with your teachers/pupils immediately after attending the funeral of a colleague? When was the last time you did either of these things in a foreign language? Shared experiences of all kinds do bring people closer together. But where I work, we generally don't learn for tests with disputed grading systems; we learn for life.
So on Thursday morning I made my way to school for a morning of cooking. I was psyched up; I knew who was doing what and by when. The meal was a triumph, as evidenced by one girl who needed the English translation of the word meaning to scrape off, enabling her to ensure that none of the residual mashed potato or fish bits would be thrown away. But these events had been tempered earlier by the shocking news that a former colleague (a fellow language teacher) had died. It was decided that the school would be closed on Friday morning so that as a team, all members of staff could go to the funeral, joined by older students who wished to attend. I was moved when, during the service, my late colleague's husband and her sisters played one of my favourite pieces of music – the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major. The service was conducted bilingually in German and French and it was respectful.
And as we left the church to return to school, the head asked what food we had with us for lunch. Well, there was one fish pie left in the fridge – we'd made 10 pies altogether. There was some mashed potato left... and some bread. With the addition of some cheese, we then had enough for a shared meal. Eleven of us ate at the staff table and discussed, in English, everything from weekend plans to fairy tales that I'd never heard of. The rule for everyone at school is that English is the medium of communication when I'm around.
The culture at the school is non-hierarchical. Everyone addresses each other by their first name. Pupils and staff work in mutually supportive ways to reach group objectives as well as personal goals. This is very different from my own schooling in the UK. When was the last time you cooked a meal with your teachers/pupils to feed the whole school? When was the last time you had a communal meal with your teachers/pupils immediately after attending the funeral of a colleague? When was the last time you did either of these things in a foreign language? Shared experiences of all kinds do bring people closer together. But where I work, we generally don't learn for tests with disputed grading systems; we learn for life.
Saturday, 8 September 2012
Happy death-day tu vous?
Today I must report the imminent collapse of polite society as we know it.
That's what certain French social media refuseniks
would have you believe, anyway. For it seems that the enfant terrible of
the Internet – Twitter – and its users, have adopted the convention of
referring to others online using the informal second-person pronoun tu
rather than its more formal and polite equivalent, vous.
To monolingual English readers, this issue may be about as interesting as watching fifty shades of grey paint drying; but to anyone with even minimal knowledge of foreign languages, it's a huge deal. It's so important that when, aged 21, I was living in Germany and had joined a choir, an older singer asked earnestly and in perfect English:
"Can I say you to you?"
How could I refuse? I explained that English no longer had German’s distinctions in its pronouns and she was free to address me using you. We laughed about it. But back then, everyone knew their place and the Internet had yet to sound the death knell for deference and politeness. Fast-forward to 2012 and this current debate merely signifies – online, at least – the obsolescence of the distinction.
The use of tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German is predicated on certain key criteria: the age of the people involved in the interaction; their respective statuses relative to each other and the degree of familiarity between them. The article even asserts that tu is used as a form of violence between two drivers who do not know each other. But the prevalence of familiar forms online would suggest that, notwithstanding other contextual details to the contrary, no such offence is intended. Anyone offended is simply applying mutually accepted social norms from one social sphere in another – where no such norms exist. Or do people preface their online posts with phrases such as: "I am a mature person with a high-powered job. This makes me considerably richer than you. Hence I would never meet the likes of you in real life and you shall address me accordingly."? Alternatively, unless you were interested in dating your correspondent, would you request their age/sex/location/status before agreeing to engage with them at all?
Magazine director Laurent Joffrin may bemoan the perceived lack of respect that tu signifies. But can we demand it from the outset? Respect has to be earned. Status alone cannot confer it. There is also no mention of the confusion that may arise in French given that vous is also the second-person plural pronoun. The same pronoun may, context permitting, refer to one person and many people simultaneously. We often 'broadcast' online to as many people as possible. Equally we may address one person but hope that others read what we write. We may even wish to blur any such distinctions. But how do people tell the difference? Universally using tu for one person and vous for more than one person may make this Internet-specific distinction clear.
We must concede, however, that while a move from the formal to the familiar is possible by mutual agreement; the reverse is impossible. Maybe it’s this irreversible trend that Joffrin despises. But without the smokescreen of respect and deference, his attitude merely demonstrates a refusal to accept the egalitarian ethos of the Internet itself.
To monolingual English readers, this issue may be about as interesting as watching fifty shades of grey paint drying; but to anyone with even minimal knowledge of foreign languages, it's a huge deal. It's so important that when, aged 21, I was living in Germany and had joined a choir, an older singer asked earnestly and in perfect English:
"Can I say you to you?"
How could I refuse? I explained that English no longer had German’s distinctions in its pronouns and she was free to address me using you. We laughed about it. But back then, everyone knew their place and the Internet had yet to sound the death knell for deference and politeness. Fast-forward to 2012 and this current debate merely signifies – online, at least – the obsolescence of the distinction.
The use of tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German is predicated on certain key criteria: the age of the people involved in the interaction; their respective statuses relative to each other and the degree of familiarity between them. The article even asserts that tu is used as a form of violence between two drivers who do not know each other. But the prevalence of familiar forms online would suggest that, notwithstanding other contextual details to the contrary, no such offence is intended. Anyone offended is simply applying mutually accepted social norms from one social sphere in another – where no such norms exist. Or do people preface their online posts with phrases such as: "I am a mature person with a high-powered job. This makes me considerably richer than you. Hence I would never meet the likes of you in real life and you shall address me accordingly."? Alternatively, unless you were interested in dating your correspondent, would you request their age/sex/location/status before agreeing to engage with them at all?
Magazine director Laurent Joffrin may bemoan the perceived lack of respect that tu signifies. But can we demand it from the outset? Respect has to be earned. Status alone cannot confer it. There is also no mention of the confusion that may arise in French given that vous is also the second-person plural pronoun. The same pronoun may, context permitting, refer to one person and many people simultaneously. We often 'broadcast' online to as many people as possible. Equally we may address one person but hope that others read what we write. We may even wish to blur any such distinctions. But how do people tell the difference? Universally using tu for one person and vous for more than one person may make this Internet-specific distinction clear.
We must concede, however, that while a move from the formal to the familiar is possible by mutual agreement; the reverse is impossible. Maybe it’s this irreversible trend that Joffrin despises. But without the smokescreen of respect and deference, his attitude merely demonstrates a refusal to accept the egalitarian ethos of the Internet itself.
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