Introduction: Perception and Processing of Address Terms

People can address each other in many ways, and this can be studied in many ways too. Studies on forms of address in language often focus on the choices that a speaker has to address their interlocutor, for which they “seem to rely on a complex network of factors” (Liebscher et al., 2025) such as age and the nature of the relation between the interlocutors (e.g., Schoenmakers et al., 2025), or the particular language in which they communicate in the case of a multinational company (den Hartog et al., 2022).

Speakers’ choices of how to address someone can be quite conscious. Schoenmakers et al. (2025) investigated the choice of pronouns of address in Surinamese and Caribbean Dutch. One participant (46 years old) reported that she was taught in her childhood to use the formal V-pronoun u to address people who were older and people providing a service, but that she no longer used u, “only to my grandmother. I believe that using u is outdated. I started adjusting my forms of address” (Schoenmakers et al., 2025, p. 191). Liebscher et al. (2025) investigated the forms of address used in the linguistic landscape of Mannheim in Germany and argued that each form was consciously chosen among a set of alternatives because it serves a particular function (e.g., the informal T-pronoun du was used in activist contexts to appeal to youthful and open-minded target groups).

A question that has received less attention in the literature is whether and how a speaker’s choice regarding a certain form of address may affect the addressee(s), and if it does, whether the effect is in accordance with the speaker’s intentions. How would the grandmother mentioned in the quote above react if her granddaughter suddenly started addressing her with the Dutch T-pronoun jij? Would younger or open-minded people in Mannheim feel less engaged with an activist message when they were addressed with the German V-pronoun Sie?

The current Special Issue contributes to our understanding of how forms of address are perceived and processed by the addressee, either consciously or unconsciously. If the use of a certain form of address does not always have the effect intended by the speaker, this may help to explain various mixed results from recent studies on address forms. For example, there is a clear trend towards the use of the informal T-pronoun in business communication in The Netherlands, and Dutch consumers seem to appreciate product advertisements with the informal T-pronoun more than with the formal V-pronoun (Leung et al., 2023; Schoenmakers et al., 2023). However, they estimate the product’s price as higher when a formal V-pronoun is used, which might increase their purchase intention (de Hoop et al., 2024). Also, Leung et al. (2023) showed that V-pronouns were more likely to be preferred and receive more positive responses when used by more competent brands. Companies might thus strategically use the formal V-pronoun at times to exude luxury or look competent.

Another example of mixed results can be found in the context of HR communication. de Hoop et al. (2023) found that Dutch participants appreciated organizations and recruiters by which they were addressed in an email with the formal V-pronoun more than with the informal T-pronoun. Similarly, den Hartog et al. (2024b) found that both French and German participants were more positive about recruiters who addressed them with formal V-pronouns than with informal T-pronouns in an online job interview. They also found that German male participants expected a higher salary if they were addressed with the formal V-pronoun. In contrast, in an experimental study on job advertisements, den Hartog et al. (2024a) found that Dutch participants estimated a higher salary if highly competent companies addressed them with the informal T-rather than the formal V-pronoun.

Heinz Kretzenbacher and Susanne Hensel-Börner argue that, because of various historical events, the sociolinguistic norms regulating address in German (in- and outside of Germany) are convoluted. Therefore, responses to the ongoing shift towards the default use of informal address in Western European service encounters are particularly interesting in a German context. Kretzenbacher and Hensel-Börner exploratorily investigated how German respondents perceive salespersons using the informal T-pronoun or the formal V-pronoun with customers, using prerecorded videos of service encounters in which the customer was looking to buy sports shoes, a small car, or open a new account with a local bank. The authors did not find a general trend favoring the T-strategy over a V-strategy—if anything, the salesperson was rated more positively when they used the V-form.

Sebastian Sadowski, Helen de Hoop, and Laura Meijburg conducted an experiment to test the influence of T and V in Netherlandic Dutch charity slogans, where the communicative goal is to activate people to donate money. Based on previous literature that implied that a formal language style can boost donation intentions, Sadowski et al. investigated the impact of T- and V-pronouns on the participants’ intention to donate money to charity. They found that altruistic participants indicated higher intentions to donate money when T was used. This result surprisingly did not corroborate previous research regarding the level of formality in charity appeals. Sadowski et al. argue that the discrepancy could be due not to the formality of the text, but to the different possible interpretations of the pronouns of address under investigation (see de Hoop et al., in press). They proposed that V-pronouns do not have a generic reading and are more readily interpreted as directives, to which their participants might have felt a certain resistance. However, the authors conducted a follow-up experiment with new participant groups that casts doubt on this interpretation: the experimental sentences were rated as more likely to be interpreted as generic with any of the second-person pronouns. Thus, Sadowski et al. concluded that the higher donation intentions found in their experiment must have been due to the use of informal instead of formal pronouns after all.

The contribution by Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia discusses one particular factor that potentially bears on the fact that the Shawi—an Indigenous population in the Peruvian Amazon—remained relatively unscathed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in spite of the fact that the overall Indigenous population in Peru endured much higher infection and mortality rates than the general population. Focusing on the importance of effective communication strategies in times of crisis, Rojas-Berscia noted that the Shawi translations of information posters distributed by the Peruvian State uniquely made use of first-person inclusive forms; translations into other Indigenous languages instead used second-person imperative forms. The author argues that the first-person inclusive forms could have led to an elevated sense of community, in that the State is presented as a member of the Shawi community and could thus have been more effective than the second-person imperative forms used in other languages. Perhaps the Shawi population had followed the instructions more consistently, and Rojas-Berscia therefore concluded that the pronouns used on the COVID-19 posters may have been one of the factors underlying the fact that the Shawi were less affected by the pandemic.

Laura Rosseel, Eline Zenner, Fabian Faviana, and Bavo Van Landeghem presented an experimental investigation into the question whether Belgian Dutch-speaking consumers noticed any differences between corporate communications in which the T-pronoun jij or the V-pronoun u was used. Participants in the experiment read two versions of a text that differed in several ways, one of which was the pronoun of address that was used. They were asked to indicate whether they had noticed any differences between the texts. Rosseel et al. reported that only a very small minority had noticed the switch between address forms, even among the participants who had a language-related professional background. Rosseel et al. argued that a reason for this could be the non-standard status of Belgian Dutch: unlike the Netherlandic Dutch address paradigm, Belgian Dutch employs an additional informal pronoun gij. The standardized T-form jij is considered as more formal in Belgium than in The Netherlands, because it is only used by speakers of Belgian Dutch in formal contexts that arguably require the use of standard Netherlandic Dutch (cf. De Dijn et al., 2025).

Although the participants in Rosseel et al.’s study did not consciously notice the difference between T- and V-pronouns in the text, it might still be the case that they were unconsciously affected by the pronoun of address. Patricia Sánchez Carrasco, Marjolein van Hoften, and Gert-Jan Schoenmakers conducted a self-paced reading experiment in which French participants read two stories written in first and in third person, after which they completed a questionnaire to measure their immersion in the stories. In the questionnaire, readers were addressed with either T or V. In French, it is unusual to be addressed with T by a stranger, and this can lead to a negative opinion of the speaker. However, the questionnaire in this study was not about the speaker (the researcher or writer of the questionnaire), but about immersion in and emotional engagement with the stories the participants had just read. As expected, Sánchez Carrasco et al. found higher reported immersion scores for stories written in first than in third person, but remarkably, they only found it when formal V-pronouns were used in the questionnaire, and not when informal T-pronouns were used. Sánchez Carrasco et al. concluded that the use of the inappropriate T-pronoun in the questionnaire after the reading task threw the participants off balance to such an extent that the differences in immersion they experienced between first- and third-person stories completely disappeared.

While the study by Sánchez Carrasco et al. found unconscious effects of being addressed with T- or V-pronouns on the readers’ immersion in a story, Hanna Lappalainen and Maija Saviniemi examined the conscious metalinguistic comments on how forms of address affected the first-person narrator and other characters in a Finnish autobiographical novel series of 26 volumes. Lappalainen and Saviniemi noted that perceptions of address are difficult to study through authentic interaction, because addressees may find it unpleasant or offensive to be addressed in an inappropriate way. They also pointed out that variation in forms of address is one of those linguistic features ordinary speakers (i.e., non-linguists) often have strong feelings about. Fiction, as Lappalainen and Saviniemi argue, can provide access to the characters’ perceptions of forms of address in the narrative world, which in an autobiographical work like the novel series they studied, can be considered to mirror the author’s perceptions of forms of address used in the real world. For example, the narrator frequently describes the use of third-person (indirect) address, by which a speaker can avoid the choice between T and V in cases of doubt. One example is when the narrator’s father addresses his daughter-in-law in third person. Although it was common in those days to address a daughter-in-law with T, the father considered his son’s wife higher in social status. When the narrator himself is addressed indirectly in the story by old acquaintances that look up to him, he finds it very unpleasant. Lappalainen and Saviniemi argue that the narrator feels disconnected from his former home region, and this disconnect increases when people address him indirectly.

A similar case of indirect address is the use of the forms oom ‘uncle’ and tannie ‘aunt’ in Afrikaans. In contrast to the negative feelings evoked in the narrator by the use of indirect address forms in Lappalainen and Saviniemi’s study, Carla Ellis found an overall positive sentiment towards these third-person forms of address. Ellis collected data from questionnaires and interviews. In investigating these data, Ellis focused on how first language speakers of Afrikaans thought about the use of oom ‘uncle’ and tannie ‘aunt’. All age groups disagreed with the statement that these terms were old-fashioned. Younger participants (18–29 years old) indicated that they felt old when addressed as oom or tannie, but the majority of people of 30 years and older only sometimes felt old when addressed as such, and almost all participants of 50 years and older indicated that they did not feel old when addressed as oom or tannie. Furthermore, most participants indicated that they agreed with the statement that the forms oom and tannie are used to show respect. The forms are considered polite but at the same time informal, comfortable, and “even comforting”. Ellis emphasizes that the use of these forms is not dictated by a prescriptive norm within the Afrikaans community, instead it is a culturally accepted way to address people, as long as they are at least ten years older than the speaker.

What is a prescriptive norm, is the ban on mixing of T- and V-pronouns in Netherlandic Dutch, as studied by Suzanne Pauline Aalberse, although the reason to mix T and V could be the same as in the case of Afrikaans, namely, to signal respect and express closeness at the same time. The use of pronoun mixing in Netherlandic Dutch has been argued to be functional. Aalberse investigated the perception of pronoun mixing among high school students, who she assumed to be in the process of learning the prescriptive norm. Surprisingly, she found large individual differences in the perception of mixing. First of all, most students had never noticed the phenomenon of pronoun mixing. However, when Aalberse asked them how they felt about pronoun mixing, about one third said they thought it was wrong, sloppy, or weird. Others said that they did not care, and a few said that mixing was a special style. One informant said “it is a style. You are nice and you show respect.” Interestingly, shifting from V to T was perceived as something positive, because it shows that the addressee is jij-waardig ‘T worthy’. Some students liked it when companies addressed them with the informal T-pronoun in an email but then ended their email with the formal V-pronoun, because that was considered netjes ‘proper’ or zakelijk ‘professional’.

As the studies by Aalberse, Ellis, and Lappalainen and Saviniemi show, address is not always a clear-cut binary T/V system (cf. Fernández-Mallat & Moyna, 2025). The system may be subject to ongoing changes to and interpretations of the sociolinguistic norm. As a case in point, nominal forms in European Portuguese have gained ground in the domain of address and have in fact started taking over the paradigmatic position of the pronominal V-form. Rita Faria’s contribution discusses a recent event that showcases the instability of the politeness paradigm in European Portuguese: in 2020, soccer coach Jorge Jesus (Benfica) used the address pronoun você in court to address the prosecutor. Although você is the pronominal V-form in European Portuguese (opposing the pronominal T-form tu), Jesus’s use of it was considered inappropriate and he was reprimanded for it because você lacks specific semantic content: he should have instead used the nominal form Senhora Procuradora ‘Madam Prosecutor’—a third-person form that states the occupational and hierarchically superior status of the addressee. Faria argues that an appropriate form of address is selected automatically, based on social norms and collective expectations. That is, Jesus was reprimanded because he failed to discern from the situation that he should have used a polite nominal form, which implies that você is essentially a neutral N-form rather than a polite V-form in European Portuguese. As Jesus’s case caused quite a commotion in Portugal, Faria analyzed a sample of comments left on online versions of local newspapers and on X (formerly Twitter). She observed that the public response was extremely diverse. On the one hand, support could be found for a reliance on the established sociolinguistic norms such that the use of nominal forms and honorifics is considered appropriate and the use of você is not. On the other hand, there were respondents who rejected the hierarchical paradigm and stressed that Portugal is an egalitarian society—an ideology that has seen growing support since the Carnation Revolution in 1974. The sociocultural perception of pronouns of address can thus be quite intricate and warrants additional research.

The contributions to this Special Issue provide insight into the different perceptions that individual addressees may have of forms of address, which can have very different causes. The Finnish narrator in Lappalainen and Saviniemi’s study had a low opinion of himself, which made him feel uncomfortable when people addressed him formally. Kretzenbacher and Hensel-Börner’s research showed that addressing customers formally rather than informally led to a more positive perception of a salesperson. However, the participants in their study were observers, not the addressees themselves, whose perceptions might have been different. The participants in Sánchez Carrasco et al.’s study only reported a higher immersion in first-person stories when they were addressed formally in the questionnaire afterwards, while Sadowski et al. found that (altruistic) participants showed a higher donation intention when they were addressed informally. Faria showed that in European Portuguese, the use of a V-pronoun instead of indirect address with a title is considered impolite by some but not all people, while most participants in Ellis’s study on Afrikaans considered the use of the indirect forms of address oom ‘uncle’ and tannie ‘aunt’ to be respectful but at the same time informal. Rosseel et al. found that most Belgian Dutch-speaking participants in their study did not even notice shifts from T to V or vice versa. Similarly, Netherlandic Dutch-speaking pre-university students in Aalberse’s study often did not notice it when T- and V-pronouns were mixed. However, it remains unclear whether being addressed with either pronoun may have unconsciously affected these participants. A strong case for the potential (unconscious) effect of a particular form of address is reported on in Rojas-Berscia. In a campaign by the Peruvian government to advise indigenous citizens on measures against COVID-19, the Spanish version of a poster was translated into 24 indigenous languages. However, only the Shawi translator translated directives in the second person (“wash your hands”) into inclusive plural forms in the first person (“let’s wash our hands”), which apparently led to the Shawi population being more inclined to follow the advice.

We hope that future research into forms of address will pay more attention to the conscious or unconscious perception of being addressed in a certain way and the intended and sometimes unintended effects thereof.