vostè

See also: voste and vosté

Catalan

Alternative forms

• vosté (Valencia)

Etymology

Contraction of vostra (“your”) mercè (“mercy”). First attested in the 16th century. Compare Spanish vuestra merced (later shortened to usted).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): (Northern) [busˈte̞]
• IPA^(key): (Balearic) [vosˈtə]
• IPA^(key): (Central) [busˈtɛ]
• IPA^(key): (Valencia) [vosˈte]
• IPA^(key): (Northwestern) [bosˈte]

• Audio (Barcelona):

  (file)

Pronoun

vostè (strong)

1. you (formal, singular)

   Synonyms: (common) tu, (formal) vós

Usage notes

• Vostè is a very polite form of address for a single person. It is used with the third-person singular form of the verb. (Compare the polite usage of você in Portuguese and usted in Spanish.) Traditionally it was only used with judges, doctors, and so on, with vós being used in most polite situations, for example with elderly people, and tu being used in informal situations. Nowadays, tu is the most common form, even in formal contexts, and vostè is becoming more common than vós because of contact with Spanish. In Valencian, this word is usually spelled vosté, since it has /e/ instead of /ɛ/.

Declension

Catalan personal pronouns and clitics

number	person		nominative	proclitic		enclitic		possessive
				accusative	dative	accusative	dative
singular	1st	standard	jo, mi3	em, m’		-me, ’m		meu
		majestic1	nós	ens		-nos, ’ns		nostre
	2nd	standard	tu	et, t’		-te, ’t		teu
		formal1	vós	us		-vos, -us		vostre
		very formal2	vostè	el, l’	li	-lo, ’l	-li	seu
	3rd	m	ell	el, l’	li	-lo, ’l	-li	seu
		f	ella	la, l’4	li	-la	-li	seu
		n	―	ho	li	-ho	-li	seu
plural
	1st		nosaltres	ens		-nos, ’ns		nostre
	2nd	standard	vosaltres	us		-vos, -us		vostre
		formal2	vostès	els		-los, ’ls		seu
	3rd	m	ells	els		-los, ’ls		seu
		f	elles	les	els	-les	-los, ’ls	seu
3rd reflexive			si	es, s’		-se, ’s		seu
adverbial	ablative/genitive		―	en, n’	―	-ne, ’n	―
	locative			hi		-hi

¹ Behaves grammatically as plural.   ² Behaves grammatically as third person.
³ Only as object of a preposition.   ⁴ Not before unstressed (h)i-, (h)u-.

Further reading

• “vostè”, in Diccionari de la llengua catalana [Dictionary of the Catalan Language] (in Catalan), second edition, Institute of Catalan Studies [Catalan: Institut d'Estudis Catalans], April 2007
• “vostè” in Diccionari normatiu valencià, Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua.
• Alcover, Antoni Maria; Moll, Francesc de Borja (1963), “vostè”, in Diccionari català-valencià-balear (in Catalan)