[LINK] "Tu and Twitter: Is it the end for 'vous' in French?"

[rfmcdonald]

BBC News Magazine's Rebecca Lawn writes about one potential form of technology-triggered language change: the shift to more informal second person pronouns in French (and, as discussed in the article, in other languages like Spanish which make the same distinction).

Anthony Besson calls most people "vous". As a young man, it is a sign of respect to those older than him, and he's often meeting new people through his work in PR in Paris.

Yet this all changes on social media. "I always use 'tu' on Twitter," Besson says. "And not just because it takes up fewer of the 140 characters!"

Lots of other French people do exactly the same.

"Tu" is normally for family and friends, but when you're communicating through @ symbols, joining networks and tweeting under a pseudonym, a formal "vous" can seem out of place, even to someone you've never met.

Antonio Casilli, professor of Digital Humanities at Telecom ParisTech engineering school, says the web has been used as a tool for breaking down social barriers from its very beginning, resulting in a distinctively "egalitarian political discourse".

The pervasive pattern of speech on the web in the 1990s, he says, was "cyber-utopian California-style libertarian discourse, inherited from 1960s counter-culture".

And the egalitarian spirit remained when the "participatory web" came of age in the mid-2000s, he suggests.

Social networking sites such as Twitter take this one step further, adopting codes "characterised by a heightened sense of emotional proximity", such as friending on Facebook, he says.

Twitter, meanwhile, follows on from a long line of internet forums where users could be anonymous.

"In the philosophy of the internet, we are among peers, equal, without social distinction, whatever your age, gender, income or status in real life," Besson says.

Addressing someone as "vous" - or expecting to be addressed as "vous" - on the other hand, implies hierarchy.

It is, as Casilli puts it, "a major break in the code of communication… an attempt to reaffirm asymmetric social roles… a manifestation of distance that compromises social cohesion".