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Vousvoyering and tutoyering is tricky for non-Francophones -- it's rather instinctive, and I've always found it hard to get the hang of. "Vous" is the more formal form of address, and is more polite for strangers and your elders, but once you get to a certain degree of familiarity, "vous" can start to seem overly formal and even slightly mocking; like when you were a kid and people would call you "chief."
I vousvoyer and tutoyer almost interchangably. When in doubt, ask: after over a year in the same office, I finally broke down and asked my employer which she preferred, and she asked me to finally switch to "tu," as we got along very well. But she would have been well within her rights to ask me to keep vousvoyering, which would mean she wanted to maintain a professional/seniority difference.
Back to the actual subtitles: it would be brash and shocking for a kid to refer to an adult they're not on extraordinarily familiar terms with as "tu," like suddenly referring to your friend's parents by their first names when you're about eight years old and haven't been asked to. Similarly, an adult vousvoyering a kid would indicate he's either in a position of forced familiarity, like a waiter or a host, he's mocking/patronizing the kid, or the kid is royalty or something. |
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