The Undervalued Vos

When you study Spanish in school, they generally tell you that there are two forms that you use to express the word you- usted (unfamiliar or showing respect) and tu (informal/familiar).

However, if there's one thing I've fallen in love with recently about Nicaragua, it's the word "vos." While delegitimized by Spanish grammaticists, vos is used in the majority of Central and South American dialects of Spanish as the informal "you", albeit in different forms depending on the region. Note that I say region and not country: in Nicaragua, for example, no one in the Northern mountainous region uses vos, opting for an exclusive use of usted.

But there's something that I find really sexy about vos (pronounced bos, with the o pronounced roughly the same as way as rose), the way it comes out of your mouth round and hot and thick and resonant, and the intimacy or friendship it implies. So many times people use usted with me, which makes me feel old and too respectable, or tu, assuming I won't understand vos, which makes me feel ever more conscious of my outsider status.

Vos is just right. The kind of casualness I miss from American culture, but with an implication that I could belong here, that there are ties and friendships that anchor me.

It saddens me that students of Spanish aren't usually taught this form. It's a giant slight to so many Latino cultures, and sometimes even to the students themselves, because in their grammar classes, vos is treated like the redheaded stepchild, abandoned in favor of the two forms that dominate the written word. It's a shame, because I think it harms the students pride in their culture, in what they speak with their siblings or their friends, deeming these linguistic interactions to be of a lower quality.