The second person pronominal variation: sociolinguistics contributions for Portuguese teaching

Abstract

The grammatical tradition registers você (you)  and tu (you)  as personal nominative pronouns. In Brazilian Portuguese, however, there is the variation você/tu and the substitution of the plural form vós (you - plural)  to vocês (you - plural). In this article, which is based on variationist sociolinguistics (LABOV, 2008), considering the distance between the  language use and the Portuguese Language school teaching, we discussed traditional grammarians and textbooks to reflect how this variable phenomenon can be approached in Portuguese teaching, so that it contemplates diverse linguistic varieties.