Why doesn’t English have a separate form of politeness for vouvoying?

Answer

Dear Annemarie,

the explanation lies in a general pattern of language change, which can also be seen at work in the history of Dutch. That is why I first illustrate with Dutch:

PHASE 1: Dutch has a separate 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural, du and ghi respectively. This is the Middle Dutch situation.

PHASE 2: language users will also use ghi in the singular. They do that for courtesy. You can show your respect for the addressee by pretending that the addressee is a whole group of people, instead of just one. In other words, you imagine the person being addressed as extra large and yourself extra small. Ghi thus becomes polite form of address, but in the meantime ghi also continues to exist as an ordinary 2nd person plural, and du as an unpolite (confidential/non-hierarchical) 2nd person singular.

PHASE 3: from ‘not polite’ du evolves more and more to ‘rude’, while ghi is becoming more and more the common form. You can see this as a kind of inflation in the politeness of ghi: in matters of politeness it is better to be safe, better address someone politely with ghi than offend him/her with du (the same is at the moment on the corridor with the French tu-vous distinction, where tu is restricted to a smaller and smaller circle of trusted people and vous becomes the general ‘safe’ form of address). In the long run, the consequence is that du is repressed, and also that ghi loses its distinctive function as a form of politeness.

PHASE 4: ghi is now the only remaining form in the 2nd person singular. There is no longer any possibility of making the distinction polite/unpolite, and there is no longer any distinction between singular and plural in the 2nd person. Dutch has solved this situation by creating a new form of politeness: the expression uwe nobility was recruited for this and shortened by frequent use to uws and eventually you. And to indicate the plural, all kinds of combinations were made, such as ghi + men, which yielded for example you or generous.

So what’s going on in English? English also started out with a singular form and another plural form, namely thou and you. You entered the singular as a polite form and functioned for a while beside thou. For example, Shakespeare’s plays show how thou is used for intimate relations and you rather for relations of authority or distant relations. In the end, however, you almost completely supplanted its counterpart thou (now you only hear thou in formal contexts with archaic language use, which, paradoxically enough, has made the form sound formal itself). You is now the only form for singular and plural, and the politeness distinction in the form of address has also disappeared.

What the future holds is increasingly difficult to predict in language development, but it seems that English is looking for a new 2nd person plural by strengthening you in the plural with all tot you all, or shorter y’all. It is doubtful, however, whether English will also recruit a new form of politeness. In any case, there are no indications for this yet. In general, moreover, the development of politeness is linked to social developments. Politenesses arise in societies that attach great importance to marking social distinctions. It is no coincidence that polite forms in European languages ​​arose during the Renaissance, when social divisions became less self-evident (there was an increase in social mobility), but hierarchical relations and class distinctions still remained very important. In our current Western society, less and less importance is attached to hierarchical relationships. In other words, the breeding ground for a new courtesy distinction may have disappeared.