TU AND VOUS.

TU AND VOUS. Today’s New York Times has a good article by Elaine Sciolino on the cultural significance of the new French President Nicholas Sarkozy. The article gives an example of the gradual change toward informality in the French language. “Mr. Sarkozy uses the informal ‘tu’ instead of the formal ‘vous’ with colleagues and journalists alike. But two weeks ago, when Mr. Sarkozy addressed Alain Juppé, one of his senior ministers and a former prime minister in the formal Chirac era, with ‘tu’, Mr. Juppé seemed so flummoxed that he replied in a convoluted formulation, avoiding both ‘you’ forms.” Juppe is about ten years older than Sarkozy. In 1970, I had a friend, a young French woman (probably born in the same year as Juppe), who was a translator at the UN. She told me that she used “tu” with her colleagues at the UN, but that when her oldest childhood friend visited from France, they had been unable to bring themselves to use “tu” to each other.