The Impending Demise of "tu" in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Since the early 1960s, the tuteo (T-T), and particularly the use of tonic tu with the vos verbal morphology (T-V) has been accepted as typical of the speech of Montevideo, Uruguay, a region generally classified as voseante. This paper reports on the results of 117 rapid anonymous interviews conducted in Montevideo to document the status of tu in the early twenty-first century. Interview results are studied according to five business domains, as well as the sex and age of the consultants. Results show that T-V continues to be used in Montevideo, particularly among speakers over 40 who work with upper socioeconomic clientele. The absence of tu among speakers under 40 points to a future loss of the academic tuteo and the regional T-V in favor of a stable voseo reminiscent of Buenos Aires, Argentina. perceived social relationships, and attitudes as they pertain to "correct" Spanish. The voseo has garnered considerable attention in studies on pronouns of address given its extensive use, coupled with its ambiguous perceived propriety throughout countries or regions, a situation that appears at times to pit the regional vos against the academic standard tu. This "ambiguity" as to the appropriateness of the voseo serves as the central theme of the study at hand, which examines the use of tu and vos in the Spanish of Montevideo, Uruguay. The use of both pro- nouns in Montevideo distinguishes that city's dialect from the Plate River norm of universal voseo, which predominates in Buenos Aires, the "linguistic capital" of the Plate River region (Benavides 2003: 619). The present study updates prior dialectal data to consider pronoun and corresponding verb form usage in the early twenty-first century and proposes that language change is underway in Montevideo. Such change will likely result in the disappearance of tu in