You, fag, daddy: current forms of treatment of the second person singular in the Venezuelan Andes

Abstract

The main objective of this text is to give an account of the forms of treatment of the second person singular you / vos currently used in the Andes of Venezuela and to scrutinize their use in different situational contexts of communication. Three aspects are addressed in this study: first, in Venezuela it is common to make the social distinction of distance and closeness, of solidarity and power the you. However, in recent times expressions have appeared with verb forms of you intertwined. There is a total alternation. The second aspect to consider is that until the eighteenth century in the Venezuelan Andean region the you (vos / voseo in Spanish, form of treatment of the second person singular that does not exist in English. The name is kept in Spanish for the study) was used as a form of second-person treatment and the distinction between the zulian voseo and the andean voseo was possible. Today the “vos” has disappeared from the Andean area the Venezuelan. It is no longer “vosea” in Mérida, nor in Táchira and the only people who continue to using this treatment in the Andean area are the Trujillo, however, at present there are different degrees of alternation that are produced by the use of the pronouns. The third aspect to be developed is related to the use of the word fag, which is in a phase of transition from an insult to a pragmatic anti-courteous marker that indicates solidarity —as a synonym for friend— and is losing its offensive character. The topic is conducive to giving an account of the handling of words such as friend, bug, brother (bro), ox, gentleman, fair, pussy, kid, boy, rooster, jerk, crazy, minor, my king, baby, corduroy, dog, old man and daddy to address the immediate interlocutor. The material of this study is based on a personal survey of randomly selected speakers, carried out between the years 2016 and 2020. No stratification of the study group is carried out and the respondents are subjects of different ages, sex, social and educational stratum. All resided in the Venezuelan Andean zone although not necessarily born there. The technique used to collect and record the information is the personal survey. The instrument consists of a list of closed and open questions, previously established related to the variables to be measured, which are applied through a questionnaire that is provided directly to the participants who answer it.