Forms of address across languages: Formal and informal second person pronoun usage among Estonia's linguistic communities

Abstract

This paper examines linguistic politeness in a bilingual society, focusing on forms of address among Estonian speakers and Russian speakers in Estonia. We ask in what ways groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different norms of politeness and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especially on the choice of the formal or informal form of the second person pronoun, but we also investigate other aspects of sociolinguistic interaction. The analysis is based on university students' responses to a sociolinguistic questionnaire. Data from both native Estonian speakers in Estonia and native Russian speakers in Russia are compared with data from Russian speakers living in Estonia. We find that where differences are apparent between Estonian and Russian speakers, the Russian diaspora in Estonia falls between both of the majority groups.