(When) Can I say Du to You? The metapragmatics of forms of address on German-Speaking Twitter

Abstract

On 02.06.2020, the social media team of the Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, announced on Twitter that for a three-month launching phase, they would use the singular T-form du to address their customers. On the basis of a corpus of public tweets analyzed as metapragmatic comments, I examine which stances users adopt and what these stances tell us about how the German-speaking Twittersphere metapragmatically assesses the appropriateness of pronouns of address in social networks. I show how the shift to the T-form is well accepted only if restricted to Twitter, while being strongly disfavored and deemed inappropriate if understood against the background of a customer-client's relation. While the users in favor of the V-form present their arguments in a direct way, most users who plead for the T-form resort to irony and banter, thus constructing the online persona of ‘cool’ people aware of appropriateness norms on social media. I conclude by showing how the clash between antagonistic — and possibly irreconcilable — positions can then be framed as a conflict between globalized norms fostering the use of T-forms as a conventionalized practice on social media and local norms of politeness, as the V-form remains the unmarked way of addressing an unknown adult in Germany.