Tu vs Você Usage

The single grammatical difference that most visibly separates a Portuguese child from a Brazilian child is the second person. A Portuguese six-year-old asks a classmate "Tu tens um lápis?" — "Do you have a pencil?" — using the pronoun tu and the second-person singular verb form tens. A Brazilian six-year-old asks the same question as "Você tem um lápis?" — using você and the third-person singular tem. The two questions mean identical things, but they encode completely different social systems and trigger completely different verb paradigms. Once you understand this split, a great deal of PT-PT vs BR grammar falls into place.

This page walks through how each variety handles second-person address: which pronouns exist, how they agree with verbs, which possessives go with them, and what happens with imperatives. If you have trained your ear on Brazilian Portuguese and want to switch to PT-PT — or if you have trained on PT-PT and want to understand what you are hearing from Brazilian speakers — this is one of the two or three highest-yield pages in the whole guide.

The PT-PT system: a three-way (or four-way) split

European Portuguese distinguishes at least three levels of second-person address, and arguably four. Every level has its own pronoun and its own verb form.

Tu — the living informal

Tu is the default informal second-person pronoun in Portugal. It takes its own set of verb endings — the second person singular — which are completely different from the third-person forms:

A PT-PT speaker uses tu with close friends, family members, children, classmates, romantic partners, pets, and generally with anyone roughly their own age in informal situations. It is warm and unremarkable — the pronoun of everyday intimacy.

Note the last example — se tu fores uses the future subjunctive of ir for tu, which also has its own distinct form (fores, not for). The tu paradigm runs all the way through the verb system: indicative, subjunctive, imperative, each with its own second-person-singular endings.

Você — the awkward middle

Você in Portugal is complicated. Historically it emerged as a contraction of vossa mercê ("your mercy") and carried strong deferential weight. In Brazil it drifted down the politeness scale and became the default informal pronoun. In Portugal it has stayed in a genuinely awkward middle position — semi-formal, potentially polite, potentially cold, potentially condescending, depending on who says it to whom.

Some Portuguese speakers use você freely with acquaintances, colleagues, and strangers as a neutral pronoun. Others avoid it entirely because they find it either too formal for friends or too familiar for strangers. Regional variation is real: você is more common in the north of Portugal than in Lisbon and the south, and more common in older generations than among the young.

Whatever its social weight, você takes third-person singular verb forms — the same forms as ele ("he") and ela ("she"):

O senhor / a senhora — unambiguous formality

When you genuinely need to be formal — addressing a stranger who is older than you, a customer, a public official, someone's grandparent — PT-PT uses o senhor (for a man) or a senhora (for a woman). These phrases grammatically function as third-person noun phrases, so they take third-person singular verbs, just like você:

These are the safe default when a relationship is unclear and involves any age or status gap. You will rarely cause offence by being a little too formal; you will often cause offence by being too familiar.

The BR-PT system: basically two levels

Brazilian Portuguese has simplified the system. In the vast majority of Brazil, second-person address is effectively binary:

Você has been fully informal in Brazil for generations. Brazilian children use você with parents, friends, teachers, and strangers alike. The old tu paradigm has been nearly eliminated from standard speech — most Brazilians do not actively use the forms tens, és, falas, queres and would have to think to conjugate them correctly.

Regional BR tu — alive, but with a twist

Tu has not disappeared entirely from Brazil. It survives in several regional varieties:

• Rio Grande do Sul (the gaúcho south), where tu is used robustly and often — though not always — with proper second-person verb agreement: tu tens, tu sabes.
• The north and northeast — parts of Pará (especially Belém), Maranhão, Pernambuco (Recife), Bahia (especially Salvador), and neighbouring states — where tu is common in everyday speech.
• Parts of Rio de Janeiro, where tu pops up in casual speech among some younger speakers, often alternating with você in the same conversation.

Crucially, in most of these regions the verb is not conjugated in the second person. Instead, the pronoun tu pairs with the third-person singular verb form — producing the characteristic "Tu vai?", "Tu quer?", "Tu tem?" of colloquial Brazilian speech. This is a genuine feature of regional BR, not a mistake. In PT-PT it would be considered substandard, but in these Brazilian regions it is the ordinary spoken form.

Possessives — the teu vs seu split

The pronoun system drives the possessive system. PT-PT consistently distinguishes:

When PT-PT speakers use tu, they use teu/tua for "your":

BR speakers, using você by default, use seu and sua — which in PT-PT is the formal possessive (for você or o senhor), and which also means "his" or "her". This creates real ambiguity in BR:

PT-PT avoids this ambiguity because seu is reserved for formal "your" (você / o senhor). For third-person possession, PT-PT strongly prefers dele / dela:

See Seu / Sua Ambiguity for the full treatment.

Imperatives — where the systems diverge sharply

Imperative forms are tied directly to the pronoun system, and here PT-PT and BR look very different on the page.

PT-PT uses two distinct imperative paradigms: the tu imperative (from the indicative, minus the -s) and the você imperative (the subjunctive):

With object pronouns attached, PT-PT produces the characteristic diz-me, faz-me, dá-me:

BR uses a single imperative system based on você, and moves the clitic pronoun before the verb in ordinary speech:

Brazilian grammar books still teach the prescriptive diga-me form, but in spoken Brazilian Portuguese me diga is overwhelmingly more common. A learner who walks into a Brazilian kitchen and says diz-me onde está o sal will be understood perfectly — but they will sound Portuguese. See Pronouns with Commands for the full PT-PT imperative-with-clitic system.

Side-by-side: the same conversation in both varieties

A six-year-old asking a classmate for a pencil:

An adult asking a friend about their weekend:

A customer addressing a shopkeeper they don't know:

Note that the formal o senhor / a senhora register looks nearly identical across the two varieties — the divergence is concentrated in the informal/semi-formal band.

Common mistakes

Mistake 1: BR-trained learner using você with Portuguese friends.

Você to a Portuguese peer can feel distant, sarcastic, or even aggressive depending on tone and context. Default to tu with anyone you'd address informally, and upgrade to o senhor / a senhora for strangers.

Mistake 2: PT-PT-trained learner using tu verb forms without noticing.

If you commit to tu, commit to the -s ending on every verb — otherwise you land in the regional-BR pattern which reads as dialectal in Portugal.

Mistake 3: Using seu/sua for "your" with tu in PT-PT.

In PT-PT, mixing tu verb forms with seu possessives is inconsistent. Use teu/tua/teus/tuas throughout.

Mistake 4: Using ti instead of tu as a subject.

Tu is the subject pronoun; ti appears only after prepositions (para ti, de ti, contigo = com + ti).

Mistake 5: Using você imperatives with tu subject.

The imperative must match the pronoun level throughout. If the subject is tu, the imperative is diz; if the subject is você, the imperative is diga.

Key takeaways

• PT-PT has a living three-way system — tu (informal), você (semi-formal / contested), o senhor / a senhora (formal) — plus the "null-subject" escape hatch for ambiguous cases.
• BR has a two-way system — você (informal default), o senhor / a senhora (formal). Tu survives regionally, often paired with third-person verbs.
• Verb agreement follows the pronoun: PT-PT tu takes distinct second-person-singular forms (és, tens, vais, fazes); você takes third-person-singular forms in both varieties.
• The possessive system tracks the pronouns: PT-PT uses teu/tua with tu and seu/sua with você / o senhor; BR uses seu/sua as the default "your", creating ambiguity that is resolved with dele / dela when needed.
• Imperatives differ sharply: PT-PT has distinct tu and você imperative forms and uses enclisis (diz-me, diga-me); BR uses the você form with proclisis in speech (me diz, me diga).
• If in doubt, use tu with peers and o senhor / a senhora with strangers in Portugal. Avoid você until you have heard it used naturally with the person you're addressing.