Puedes tutearme. – Spanish and Hungarian university students’ formal and informal language use

Absztrakt (kivonat)

This study focuses on the use of second-person singular pronouns in Hungarian and Spanish among university students. Research showed that the linguistic patterns of our first language influence conversations in our second language (Gosselin, 2014). This study’s aim is to detail the use of Spanish second-person pronouns used by Hungarian university students from a cross-cultural perspective. Research is conducted with the help of two qualitative methods: questionnaires and interviews which enable us to collect information about the relation between students and teachers, their personal experience concerning pronouns, and the difficulties that Hungarian students might encounter when they start learning Spanish as a L2. The literature revealed that environmental, sociocultural, and linguistic factors have an impact on how Spanish speakers apply formal speech (Serrano, 2017). Moreover, formal speech started to disappear from the Spanish language and the use of the informal second-person pronoun tú has emerged. Contrary to the Hungarian informal second-person pronoun te the Spanish tú can hold serenity and respect. This might be one of the reasons why Spanish students talk to their teachers very differently as compared to Hungarian students. Hungary university students address instructors formally, whereas in Spain interact with their students by using tú/vosotros(second-person plural), which might generate some misunderstandings when students start using their L2. My aim is to investigate these differences in the two languages and find out if we can observe the influence of the L1’s pronouns on the usage of the pronouns in the L2 and whether the use of these pronouns can affect the relationship between the teachers and students.