Le travail et les études

You will hear that tu is winning in France. In start-ups and creative agencies that is broadly true. Everywhere else it is not, and the cost of guessing wrong runs entirely one way: being too formal makes you look careful, while being too familiar makes you look like you have not worked out where you are.

The rule that actually holds

Colleagues, your manager, clients, and anyone from another department are vous. Keep going. In plenty of French offices two people who have sat opposite each other for a decade still use vous, and neither of them finds it remarkable.

The switch, when it comes, is offered rather than assumed. Somebody says on peut se tutoyer or on se dit tu ?, and from that moment it changes. Until then you wait, however warm things feel.

Deciding on your own account that you have arrived at tu is the actual error. It reads either as a claim to outrank the other person, or as evidence you did not know the question existed.

Teachers are permanent

A professeur is vous. Not until you graduate, not until you are the same age as them, permanently. This is not stiffness. The relationship is partly defined by it, and a student who says tu to a teacher is not being relaxed, they are being insolent, and every French person in the room will hear it that way.

Vous moves more than the pronoun

The verb changes with it, and so does the possessive:

• Vous travaillez ici depuis longtemps ?
• Je vous envoie le rapport ce soir.
• Quel est votre avis ?

Note votre, not ton. Learners regularly get the pronoun right and then leak tu back in through a possessive two words later. That is worse than not attempting it, because it sounds like an act.

Boulot, travail, emploi

Le travail is work, and the word you write. Le boulot is what people actually say, informal but not rude. Un emploi is a post or a position, the administrative word. Un métier is a trade or profession, the thing you trained for.

When you get it wrong

You will, and it matters less than you fear. If you have been saying tu to somebody who expected vous, just switch. Nobody will mention it. The one thing not to do is apologise at length, which turns a small thing into an event and makes everyone study their shoes.