I was in the French-language Ontario school system until the end of Grade 8, and I cannot recall that we ever used the formal “vous”. As in, it wasn’t used (in class or in general in that primarily Francophone town) or taught, and the one time it came up in classwork at some point late in elementary school, it was so abnormal that the teacher had to explain it.
Edit: I’ve been thinking about it since I wrote the above, and I’ve realized that there may have been an additional wrinkle: the town’s majority language was French, but its prestige language was English. So someone speaking to their boss’s boss would probably have done so in English (with widely variable degrees of fluency), not French. Under those circumstances, it makes sense that the more respectful speech registers in French had mostly vanished. The teachers were pretty much all of local extraction, so they weren’t likely to be surprised by the local dialect.
That sounds like typical very formal language everywhere. I have employees calling me sir and it always throws me for a loop. I don’t think I’ve called called someone sir in my entire life. I have used ma’am when trying to get the attention of a woman I don’t know, and that’s about as formal as I’ve been.
I don’t worry too much about how I address peers and superiors, but anyone significantly younger than me, anyone who provides a service to me, and anyone I am teaching gets a “sir” or “ma’am”.
I was in the French-language Ontario school system until the end of Grade 8, and I cannot recall that we ever used the formal “vous”. As in, it wasn’t used (in class or in general in that primarily Francophone town) or taught, and the one time it came up in classwork at some point late in elementary school, it was so abnormal that the teacher had to explain it.
Edit: I’ve been thinking about it since I wrote the above, and I’ve realized that there may have been an additional wrinkle: the town’s majority language was French, but its prestige language was English. So someone speaking to their boss’s boss would probably have done so in English (with widely variable degrees of fluency), not French. Under those circumstances, it makes sense that the more respectful speech registers in French had mostly vanished. The teachers were pretty much all of local extraction, so they weren’t likely to be surprised by the local dialect.
That sounds like typical very formal language everywhere. I have employees calling me sir and it always throws me for a loop. I don’t think I’ve called called someone sir in my entire life. I have used ma’am when trying to get the attention of a woman I don’t know, and that’s about as formal as I’ve been.
I don’t worry too much about how I address peers and superiors, but anyone significantly younger than me, anyone who provides a service to me, and anyone I am teaching gets a “sir” or “ma’am”.