tu / você

Choosing 'you' depends on region and social context.

1. Tu (The 2nd Person)
In Portugal, tu is for friends, family, children, animals, and increasingly among peers or colleagues of similar standing. In Brazil, it is common in the South, North, Northeast, and Rio de Janeiro.

• Grammar: In Pará, Maranhão, and coastal Santa Catarina (like Florianópolis), speakers often use the traditional 2nd-person conjugation: Tu falas. In Pernambuco, a mixed conjugation system is common. In Rio Grande do Sul, both the 3rd-person verb (Tu fala) and the traditional 2nd-person form (Tu falas) coexist in everyday speech. In Rio de Janeiro and many other parts of the Northeast, it is usually paired with 3rd-person verbs: Tu fala. The tu pronoun is also paired with the object pronoun te, the prepositional pronoun ti, and contigo (with you).

2. Você (The 3rd Person)
Historically, você comes from Vossa Mercê (Your Grace), which explains why a word meaning 'you' takes 3rd-person verbs and possessives. In Brazil, você is the neutral standard, and it is the dominant standard in most of the Southeast (except Rio de Janeiro) and the Center-West. In Portugal, the word você is socially unstable; it can sound rude because it is often perceived as overly direct, distancing, or implying lower social status. Instead, using the bare 3rd-person verb (without a pronoun) is the most common polite register in everyday speech (e.g., Quer um café? - Do you want a coffee?). Another core polite strategy in Portugal is using the person's first name with the 3rd-person verb (e.g., O Pedro quer um café? - Do you want a coffee, Pedro?), along with using titles.

• Grammar: Always uses 3rd-person verbs (Você fala). In some regions of casual Brazilian Portuguese, it is common to mix você as the subject with the object pronoun te and the possessive teu. However, this is highly regional; in large areas like São Paulo and Minas Gerais, seu remains the standard possessive for você. In contrast, Portugal requires strict agreement for the singular você, meaning it must only be used with o/a/lhe and seu/sua. Because seu/sua can ambiguously mean 'his/hers/its' as well as 'yours', Brazilians frequently resolve this by using dele/dela after the noun for 'his/hers' while retaining seu/sua for 'your'. Additionally, Brazilians frequently use você as a direct object pronoun (e.g., Eu vi você - I saw you) to avoid formal object pronouns like o/a.

3. Addressing Groups
To address more than one person, use vocês, which acts as the universal plural for both você and tu in Brazil and standard European Portuguese, taking the 3rd-person plural verb conjugation (e.g., vocês falam - you all speak). In Portugal, vocês is commonly paired with 2nd-person plural object pronouns and possessives (vos, vosso, convosco). Brazilians avoid these, instead using de vocês for possession (e.g., o livro de vocês - your book [plural]) and vocês as an object (e.g., Eu vi vocês - I saw you all). In Northern Portugal, you may also hear the regional or archaic 2nd person plural vós.

4. Formal Address
For elders or authority figures, use o senhor / a senhora to show respect. However, for strangers of similar age or status, você is perfectly neutral and polite in Brazil, while in Portugal, using titles, the person's name, or the bare 3rd-person verb is the standard polite approach.