This book shows the current system of pronouns and forms of address in European Portuguese, thanks to fieldwork carried out throughout continental Portugal and its archipelagos. By means of an innovative method to prompt spontaneous and quantitative data, this monograph provides the paradigm that rules nowadays, together with the geographical, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and grammatical factors that affect one of the most complex and volatile phenomena in Lusophone linguistics. The results show a country extremely sensitive to politeness and distance, undergoing multiple pragmatic changes, and creating an innovative tripartite system both in singular and plural that contradicts cross-linguistic tendencies.

Victor Lara Bermejo is a professor and researcher specialised in Spanish dialectology, as well as in language contact between Portuguese and Spanish. He has worked in several universities in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Italy, and has conducted and collaborated in different research projects regarding language variation and change. Furthermore, he has authored pioneering studies on forms of address, causativisation, evidentiality, language contact, as well as code-switching in Gibraltar and Maghreb.