In pretty well all workplaces, colleagues of equal rank call each other tu, but in a group conversation with their bosses, the intermingling of tu and vous can be dizzying. Even if you call your head of department or MD tu, your colleague who doesn’t work with him or her as frequently might say vous. The boss might call everyone tu in a spirit of democracy, while simultaneously calling his secretary vous out of respect for a young subordinate. But while he calls his secretary vous during office hours, you know it’s tu in private. Oh oui.
Lovers will almost always call each other tu, of course. They are on pretty familiar terms, after all. Though there is a class of bourgeois French couple that insists on calling each other vous. Whether they get an extra thrill by changing to tu in moments of great excitement is their own business.
Family gatherings can be just as complicated as company meetings. Most families call each other tu, from toddler to grandparent. Only a few bourgeois parents insist on vous from their children. However, even in the most laidback and welcoming of families, some people won’t dare call their mothers- and fathers-in-law tu.
This whole problem can drive you crazy. Therefore, when in doubt, it is best to take the social weight off your feet by letting the French person decide. This can require a bit of linguistic dodging about. When you meet someone and you’re not sure what to call them (or you might not remember whether you’re on tutoyer terms, which is even more awkward), you have to act fast. The thing to do is get in with a ‘Ça va?’ before they can, because the required reply is ‘Oui, et toi/vous?’ If you get beaten to the draw, you can stay neutral by replying, ‘Oui, très bien, merci, et ça va, le travail?’ (‘How are things at work?’) Other possibilities would be ‘Ça va, la famille?’ (How’s the family?), ‘C’était bien, les vacances?’ (‘How were your holidays?’) or whatever you can think of asking them about without having to use tu or vous.
If you are really stuck, it is perfectly OK to say ‘Oui, très bien merci, et vous?’ and add ‘Ou est-ce qu’on se dit tu?’ – ‘Or should we call each other tu?’ The matter of how to address each other is an existential problem and is therefore a perfectly good subject for conversation.
Of course, if they reply ‘Non, on se dit vous,’ you’re in the merde.
When Are You an Idiot?
That question, ‘Est-ce qu’on se dit tu?’, contains a potentially lethal trap in the obstacle course of French pronunciation. The extremely common construction qu’on is pronounced the same way as one of the worst insults in French, con.29 Originally a slang word for the female genitalia, it is now used to mean ‘bloody stupid’ or ‘bloody idiot’.
The French are fairly lax about swearing, but even they can find it disturbing to insult people in the middle of half their sentences. This is why, in written and formal spoken French, people often change qu’on into the completely artificial que l’on.
The difficult French sound ‘on’ is said by pouting the lips and snorting the syllable through your nose. It is not to be confused with the very similar ‘en’, and ‘an’, which are more like an English ‘on’. The danger comes if you mispronounce a word like quand (when) and end up saying con. This is especially tricky because it is not always obvious in a French tone of voice whether you’re asking a question or making a statement. French questions don’t go up at the end like English ones.
This combination of misunderstandings happened to an English friend of mine, who blew his chance of getting invited to a wedding on the Côte d’Azur in one short phone call. ‘I’m getting married,’ his French sort-of-friend told him. ‘Oh yes, when?’ the Brit wanted to inquire. Unfortunately, what he actually said was ‘Ah oui? C’est con’ – ‘Oh yes? That’s bloody stupid.’
French is full of traps like this, especially if you’re a foreigner and can’t master the subtle differences between certain vowel sounds. One of the most difficult words to say in French is surtout, meaning ‘especially’, because it contains all three of the toughest sounds to pronounce. The short ‘u’, the long ‘ou’ and the guttural ‘r’. Get them wrong and you can be in trouble.
For example, mispronounce merci beaucoup (‘thanks very much’) and you end up saying merci beau cul, or ‘thanks, beautiful arse’. A mistake that can make you some interesting new acquaintances.
Similarly, a friend told me about a British accountant who came over from London head office to talk to her French colleagues and wanted to ask them about their high costs (coûts) but actually asked a meeting full of salesmen ‘Why do you have such large arses?’ (culs).
I once tried to inform a female colleague over the phone that I was just on my way to see her – en route – and later realized that I’d explained I was hurrying over en rut or ‘on heat’, like a rutting stag. When I walked into her office I wondered why she was holding her ruler baseball-bat-style. And if, like many Brits, you fail to pronounce your French ‘r’ gutturally enough at the end of coeur, you can make cri de coeur – a cry from the heart – sound exactly like cri de queue, a rather more vulgar cry from the prick. Although for French men that can often be more or less the same thing.
Another trap is the word plein or full. If you’ve had enough to eat, you can’t
