Citation: Kretzenbacher, Heinz L., and Susanne Hensel-Börner. 2024. Pronominal Address in German Sales Talk: Effects on the Perception of the Salesperson. Languages 9: 316. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages9100316 Academic Editors: Helen de Hoop and Gert-Jan Schoenmakers Received: 29 January 2024 Revised: 24 September 2024 Accepted: 25 September 2024 Published: 29 September 2024 Copyright: © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). languages Article Pronominal Address in German Sales Talk: Effects on the Perception of the Salesperson Heinz L. Kretzenbacher 1, * and Susanne Hensel-Börner 2 1 School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia 2 Department of Marketing Transformation, HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration, 20459 Hamburg, Germany; susanne.henselboerner@hsba.de * Correspondence: heinz@unimelb.edu.au Abstract: Increasing numbers of commercial enterprises in the German-speaking countries are switching from the traditional formal Sie address for customers to the more casual du address. This article reports on a part of an interdisciplinary empirical study evaluating the effect that the address pronoun used towards the customer has on the perception of the salesperson. Respondents were shown short videos of sales encounters and asked to indicate their perception of the salesperson in a guided questionnaire. The choice of either du or Sie as the address pronoun used by the salesperson in the videos did not make a substantial difference to the way the salesperson was perceived by the respondent group as a whole, but some significant differences appeared within sub-cohorts, which were determined by the gender, age group and education level of respondents, and by the industries in which the videos that the respondents watched were set. The overwhelming majority of the significant differences in the perceptions of the salesperson according to the address pronoun used shows that the salesperson using Sie is seen in a more positive light. This suggests that, somewhat surprisingly and counterintuitively, addressing customers with du does not have the general effect of improving the perception of the salesperson. Keywords: German; pronoun; T/V address; service encounter 1. Introduction Just like other parts of Western Europe, the German-speaking countries have under- gone radical societal and cultural change since the 1960s. As far as language is a symptom and an expression of social behaviour, this change is reflected in the development of the German language. Pragmatic elements of language such as addressing behaviour have been described as prime examples of the German language’s development reflecting social and cultural change (cf. Kretzenbacher 1991; Simon 2003a, 2003b). The question of how to address customers in service encounters, first triggered by the import of informal Swedish address practices into the German-speaking countries by Swedish-based international retail chains IKEA and H&M, has been a hotly discussed topic since the 1970s. Addressing interlocutors in German has the two linguistic expressions of pronominal address (by an address pronoun—obligatory in Standard German—and the agreeing verb form) and nominal address (by name and/or title forms). For the pronominal address of single interlocutors, German offers the alternatives of the second-person singular (2sg) pronoun du with 2sg verbal agreement (used to address children or socially close adults, such as family or friends) or the grammatically third-person plural pronoun Sie with 3pl verbal agreement (the default address for adult interlocutors). Thus, German seemingly follows the T/V address dichotomy postulated by the classic study by Brown and Gilman (1960), in which T stands for a more intimate address form (such as the Latin tu from which the abbreviation is derived) and V for a more formal one (such as the Latin vos). The basic binary T/V opposition can be fine-tuned by other linguistic features to make Languages 2024, 9, 316. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9100316 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages