vocêtu

Vocêtu is a sociolinguistic term used to describe the coexistence and mixing of the two second-person pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese: você and tu, together with their verb conjugations. In practice, speakers may switch between forms within a conversation or even a sentence to signal regional identity, informality, or social stance. The term is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Geographically, vocêtu has been documented in several regional varieties of Brazil, particularly in rural communities and in urban centers that preserve traditional speech patterns. The extent and rules of use vary by speaker, age, socioeconomic group, and context. In many urban settings, você is the prevailing form, while tu remains common in specific communities or among older speakers; the interaction between the two systems is a focus of sociolinguistic study as a marker of language contact and regional identity.

Linguistically, você and tu correspond to different verb conjugations: você uses the third-person singular, while tu uses the second-person singular. The mixing of forms can appear at the pronoun level and can influence verbal agreement in predictable ways. Researchers describe patterns such as co-occurrence of você and tu within the same discourse, shifts in formality, and the resilience of regional varieties amid standardization pressures. The phenomenon illustrates broader questions about linguistic variation, change, and the coexistence of multiple pronoun paradigms in a single language.