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Ok, you may be wondering why I’ve decided to upload a picture of John Paul II to this post. After all, this isn’t a Catholic blog – it’s a Spain blog. Well, my loyal readers, the reason is simple. You see, this image illustrates a point. The image came from a popular pamphlet distributed by the Catholic Church in Spain and the caption of the image proves that the vosotros verb form is used quite often in Spain (“venid” and “veréis” are both verbs conjugated for vosotros).
Many Americans (including myself) struggle with the vosotros form of verbs in Spanish because in the United States it is typical to teach Latin American Spanish rather than the Spanish of Spain. Since vosotros does not exist in Latin American Spanish, many students of Spanish from the USA do not learn how to conjugate verbs in the vosotros form. That’s why I’ve decided to put together this little summary of how to conjugate verbs in the vosotros form. I figure that other Americans like myself are probably interested in studying in Spain and need to know how to conjugate verbs for vosotros in order to communicate in Spain successfully.
First, I should mention here that vosotros is the informal version of ustedes (just like tú is the informal version of usted). In other words, you would want to use vosotros when you’re talking to a group of friends. Also remember that vosotros is only used in Spain (not Latin America). Now that we have that straight, I’d like to list a summary of the conjugation of vosotros below along with some simple examples of how the verb is used….
The conjugation of verbs with vosotros as the subject:
| Verb Tense | -AR Verbs | -ER Verbs | -IR Verbs | Examples |
| Present | -áis | -éis | -ís | Vosotros habláis (You all talk) Vosotros vendéis (You all sell) Vosotros vivís (You all live) |
| Imperfect | -abais | -íais | -íais | Vosotros hablabais (You all were talking) Vosotros vendíais (You all were selling) Vosotros vivíais (You all were living) |
| Preterit | -asteis | -isteis | -isteis | Vosotros hablasteis (You all talked) Vosotros vendisteis (You all sold) Vosotros vivistes (You all lived) |
| Future | -éis | -éis | -éis | Vosotros hablaréis (You all will talk) Vosotros venderéis (You all will sell) Vosotros viviréis (You all will live) |
| Conditional | -íais | -íais | -íais | Vosotros hablaríais (You all would talk) Vosotros venderíais (You all would sell) Vosotros viviríais (You all would live) |
| Present Subjunctive | -éis | -áis | -áis | Quiero que… Vosotros habléis (I want you all to talk) Vosotros vendáis (I want you all to sell) Vosotros viváis (I want you all to live) |
| Past Subjunctive | -arais OR -aseis |
-ierais OR -ieseis |
-ierais OR -ieseis |
Quería que… Vosotros hablarais (I wanted you all to talk) Vosotros vendierais (I wanted you all to sell) Vosotros vivierais (I wanted you all to live) |
For simplicity’s sake, I haven’t included the compound tenses or irregularities above; however, you should be able to derive those tenses from the chart without much difficulty. Now, before ending this post, I also want to mention something about vosotros commands:
Affirmative vosotros commands: These are very simple to form. You simply replace the final -r of any infinitive with a -d. For example:
Hablar –> Hablad (Talk!)
Vivir –> Vivid (Live!)
Negative vosotros commands: These commands are formed by using the same endings as used in the present subjunctive (see the chart above). For example:
No habléis (Don’t talk)
No viváis (Don’t live)
Ok, I know that this was a bit of a long post; but, it had to be long to give you a good review of the vosotros verb form. I hope that my chart has been helpful to someone out there… stay tuned for more!
Hasta luego,
–Chris
http://www.abroadinspain.com
Chris, it does exist in Spanish in the Americas. Vosotros is commonly used in El Salvador, Argentina and Uruguay. Thank you so much for conjugating again as I had forgotten about adding the “d” for the affirmative command form.
Thanks for the article. I’m currently in Spanish 3 and vosotros suddenly becomes used way more than the past two years. I got mixed up about the accent and this helped a lot.
I don’t know about El Salvador, but Argentina and Uruguay actually use “vos,” not “vosotros”. “Vos” is a 2nd person singular informal pronoun (like “tú”) that’s conjugated as such: vos hablás, vos querés, vos vivís–they still use “ustedes” to refer to the 2nd person in the plural.