Usted, tú, and occasionally vos: Variation in 2nd person singular address in New York City Spanish
New York City Spanish using a picture-caption translation task. Seventy NYC heritage/native speakers translated 40 captions—each containing you. Speaker-interlocutor pairings in pictures were stratified by age, status, gender, participant frame, and expressed affect. Participants were stratified by national heritages, childhood and adolescence locations, and gender.
2800 translations yielded 2747 2PS tokens with 275 (10.0%) using usted traditionally described as the formal variant; almost all the remainder had the predominant informal variant tú. Random forests, nested logistic regressions, and post-hoc tests show: • maintenance of factors traditionally claimed for pan-Hispanic tú/usted alternation, • confirmation of expected usted frequency by family origin, • convergence to tú associated with New York adolescence.
Findings suggest the linguistic environment of adolescence to be more important than earlier family or peer language socialization for this pragmatic variable.
