Abstract
The alternation between second-person singular (2SG) address forms—voseo and tuteo—varies widely across Latin America. In Colombia, voseo is regionally restricted to cities such as Cali and Medellín, where speakers often shift between forms within a single interaction. Unlike contexts where voseo is stigmatized (e.g., Bolivia, Chile), Cali shows widespread voseo use across socioeconomic strata, even in formal educational settings, though gender influences patterns: men favor voseo, while women more frequently employ tuteo. Despite extensive research on Argentine voseo, its use in the Present Subjunctive (PS) remains underexplored in Colombia. Prior descriptions of voseo as dominant in Cali’s PS rely mainly on self-reports rather than empirical evidence. Identifying 2SG forms is further complicated by minimal prosodic differences (e.g., vos comás vs. tú comas) and frequent pronoun elision. Because the PS is typically acquired through formal schooling, institutional ideologies may also encourage tuteo. This study provides the first empirical analysis of PS voseo in Cali through ten YouTube podcast interviews with 22 native Cali speakers (11 women, 11 men). Interviews were transcribed and coded in NVivo to differentiate closely related verb forms. Results reveal that voseo predominates in spontaneous PS speech, though tuteo coexists and alternation between forms is rare. Gender significantly predicts usage: male speakers favor voseo, while female speakers display greater variability or preference for tuteo. These findings highlight the complex interaction of grammatical mood, address forms, and gender in Colombian Spanish and underscore the value of podcast discourse for examining contemporary morphosyntactic variation.
Presenters
Edwin RodriguezStudent, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Voseo, Present Subjunctive, Sociolinguistic Variation, Polymorphy, Gender-Based Variation
