Talk:French/Lessons/Formal speech

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[edit] Vous vs. tu in web forums

In this book it says that one should always use 'vous' if one is not familiar with the person one is talking to. This seams clear so far.

However, in my native language, German, there is this similar concept of 'Du'(=tu) and 'Sie'(=vous). But we have all adopted the habit of never using 'Sie' and use only 'Du' (informal) on online forums, even though we are not familiar with the persons we are talking to. Everybody does so, and everybody is pretty comfortable with that.

Does this phenomenon also occur among french speaking people? Human Robot 08:52, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Most of the time on french speaking forums, people usally say tu each others. For example, at fr.wikipedia.org, almost everyone say tu on talk pages BUT contrary to de.wikipedia.org, the pages say vous, for exemple for the password prompt.
QUOTE : Votre nom d'utilisateur
Votre mot de passe: