Formal vs informal you, by the numbers

English has one "you". French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Mandarin each have at least two, an informal one for friends, family and children and a polite one for strangers, elders and the office — and choosing between them is one of the first social decisions a learner has to make. We counted both in the film and television dialogue of each language. The informal "you" is said more often in every one of them, but the margin runs from under two to one in French and German to 45.8 to one in Mandarin.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 7 min read

The counts

The ratio in the sixth column is the headline: how many times the informal "you" is said for every polite one. Counting them fairly is harder than it sounds, because in almost every language one of the two forms has another job as well, and the next section is about exactly that. Where a count is a ceiling — it includes uses that are not the polite singular "you" — the table says "at most" or "or more".

What makes each language hard to count

French: vous is also the plural. Vous is the polite "you" and also "you" to more than one person, friends included, and nothing in a single-word count can separate them. So the 14,141 per million for vous is a ceiling on the polite singular, and the real ratio is higher than 1.67. On the informal side we counted every form — tu, te, t' and toi — because vous also covers every one of those jobs. The possessives tell the same story: ton, ta and tes (3,499 per million) against votre and vos (2,790), which are also plural.

Spanish: usted is often said where tú is left out. Spanish usually drops subject pronouns, because the verb shows who is meant: ¿tienes hambre? needs no tú. But the usted verb form is the same as for "he" and "she", so usted is often said aloud to make clear who is meant, which flatters usted against tú. We compared the stressed forms that each side has — tú, ti and contigo against usted — because usted has no object pronoun of its own (lo, la, le and se are shared with "him" and "her"). The plurals are their own story: vosotros, the informal plural used only in Spain, is said 129 times per million against 411 for ustedes, which is the polite plural in Spain and every plural "you" in Latin America.

German: Sie is also "she" and "they". Sie (you, polite), sie (she) and sie (they) are one word apart from the capital letter, and the standard frequency lists are in lower case, so they cannot be told apart there at all. So for German we went back to the full text of the same subtitle corpus — 220 million words, capitals intact — and counted only words inside a sentence, where a capital Sie can only be the polite "you". The same rule was applied to du, dich and dir, so neither side is favoured. That gives 1.71 informal for every polite one; subject against subject, du against Sie, it is 1.22. A subtitler who writes sie for Sie by mistake loses a "you" from the count; errors the other way add one.

Italian: Lei is also "she", and nobody capitalises it. The polite Italian "you" is Lei, the same word as lei, "she". Formal Italian writing sometimes gives the polite one a capital, and the full text of the Italian subtitles shows that subtitlers almost never do: inside a sentence, capital Lei is just 0.50% of all lei. So no count can split them, and the 2,243 per million for lei is a ceiling. Even taking it as all polite, tu is said 1.53 times as often.

For a better figure we have to make an assumption, and we say what it is. If Italian films talk about women about as often, compared with men, as Spanish or English films do, then the "she" part of lei can be estimated from lui, "he". Spanish subtitles say ella 0.86 times for every él; English ones say she 0.5 times for every he. On those two assumptions the polite Lei comes to between 848 and 1,432 per million, and tu is said 2.4 to 4.0 times as often. That is an estimate, and the table marks it as one.

Portuguese: senhor is also "sir", "Mr" and "the Lord". The polite address in both countries is o senhor or a senhora, "the gentleman, the lady", and the count of senhor also includes every "sir", every "Mr Silva" and every prayer, so it is a ceiling. The informal side differs by country. In Brazil the everyday "you" is você — said 93.6 times as often as tu in Brazilian subtitles — so both are counted as informal. In Portugal tu is the informal form, and você sits in between — using it outright can sound too familiar, and many speakers address people by name or as o senhor instead — so it is left out of both sides there.

Mandarin: no ambiguity at all. 您 (nín) is the polite "you" and has no other meaning. 你 (nǐ) is said 45.8 times as often as a word on its own, and 45.1 times as often counting every word the character appears in (你们, "you all"; 你好, "hello"). The polite form has no accepted plural either — 您们 has traditionally been regarded as wrong and is rare in mainland China — so "you all" is 你们 for everyone, at 2,425 per million. 您 itself is commonest in northern Mandarin, Beijing's above all.

What the numbers say

• German and French show the narrowest margins, under two informal "you"s for each polite one — though French's true figure is higher than the one shown, because vous includes the plural.
• Spanish, Italian and European Portuguese sit in the middle, at roughly two to four informal for each polite one (Portugal's figure, 3.6 or more, is a lower bound).
• Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin barely use the polite pronoun in film dialogue at all. In Brazil that is because você — once vossa mercê, "your grace" — has become the everyday "you"; in Mandarin, 您 belongs above all to northern speech.

All of these are about film and television, which is mostly people who know each other — families, couples, colleagues, friends, enemies — so the informal form is likely to be over-represented compared with a day of shopping and phone calls. And much of the corpus is translated from English, which has no distinction at all, so every "you" in it is a choice a translator made.

Which should a learner use?

Start polite with strangers, older people and anyone serving you, and switch when invited — in French with on se tutoie ?, in German with wollen wir uns duzen? But learn the informal forms first and best, because, as the counts show, they are what you will hear most. Each course's word list ranks both by how often they are said — French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Mandarin — and the German vocabulary test shows in two minutes how far down the list you already are. Brazil's você against Portugal's tu is set out in more detail in Brazilian vs European Portuguese, and German's other capital-letter puzzle, the articles, in German articles.

Not every language splits "you" by politeness. Te reo Māori splits it by number instead: koe is one person, kōrua is two and koutou is three or more, and a greeting or an email opening has to match — see Māori greetings for emails and everyday life.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com
• The full German and Italian text of the same release, from OPUS: German and Italian, read with capitals intact.
• Wikipedia: T–V distinction — 您 commonest in northern Mandarin, and 您们 traditionally regarded as wrong; Personal pronouns in Portuguese — você from vossa mercê, replacing tu in much of Brazil, and discouraged in Portugal as too informal for many situations.
• What was counted for each language, and the estimate for Italian, are in scripts/frequency_extras.py (formal_you).