The first time a foreign friend pointed this out to me, I genuinely didn’t know what to say. We had been living together as roommates for about three weeks, he was a Canadian studying Spanish at a language school in San José and one afternoon he came home looking mildly bewildered. “I heard two guys outside,” he told me, “maybe twenty years old, playing soccer, and they kept calling each other ‘usted.’ Is that normal?” I laughed. Not because it was a strange question, but because it had never once occurred to me that it was strange at all. Of course they were using usted. They were Costa Ricans. That’s just how we talk.
This is one of those things that is invisible to us from the inside and immediately striking to everyone from the outside. Costa Rican Spanish has a relationship with the word “usted” that is entirely its own one that defies the rules you learned in any Spanish class and reveals something genuinely interesting about how we think about respect, closeness, and the way language carries feeling.
What your Spanish teacher told you and why it doesn’t apply here
In standard Spanish instruction, the pronoun landscape is relatively clear. “Tú” is for people you know well: friends, family, people your own age. “Usted” is for strangers, elders, authority figures, and formal situations your boss, a doctor, a government official. The implied message is that choosing usted creates distance, while choosing tú establishes closeness. The choice of pronoun, in most of the Spanish-speaking world, signals the nature of the relationship.
Costa Rica didn’t get that memo. Or rather, Costa Rica received it, considered it carefully, and decided to do something far more interesting.
Here, usted is the default for almost everyone, in almost every situation. You will hear it between strangers on a bus. You will hear it between coworkers who have lunch together every day. You will hear it between siblings who grew up in the same bedroom. You will hear it between a mother and the toddler she is lifting off the floor. And in none of those cases does it signal formality, distance, or hierarchy. It signals something entirely different, and understanding what requires stepping out of the grammar textbook and into the actual culture.
Usted as warmth, not distance
The key insight and this is the one that takes most foreigners a while to absorb is that in Costa Rica, usted has been emotionally reassigned. The word that the rest of the Spanish-speaking world uses to keep people at arm’s length is the word we use to pull people close. It is not a marker of formality. It is a marker of care.
Think of it this way. When a Costa Rican mother looks her child in the eye and says “¿Tiene hambre usted?”, “Are you hungry?”, she is not being distant or cold. She is being tender. The usted, in that context, carries something like: I am paying full attention to you. I am addressing you as a complete person. There is weight and warmth in this exchange.
The same logic applies between friends. When two guys in their twenties are talking about football, about a girl, about a problem at work and they use usted with each other, there is nothing stiff about it. The usted is just the water they swim in. It does not register as formal any more than a handshake registers as distant in a culture where handshakes are how everyone greets everyone.
Couples use it too, and this is perhaps the most disorienting for outsiders. Hearing a husband say “¿Cómo le fue a usted hoy?” to his wife, “How was your day?” sounds, in any Spanish classroom context, like a man speaking to his accountant. In a Costa Rican living room, it sounds like a man speaking to the person he loves. The form carries affection because that is what the form has come to mean here, through generations of use.
Where did this come from?
Linguists who study Central American Spanish have offered various explanations for Costa Rica’s usted dominance, and the honest answer is that it is probably the result of several forces working together over centuries. One important factor is geographic isolation. The Central Valley, where most of the country’s population has historically concentrated, developed its own linguistic habits somewhat separately from the broader currents of Latin American Spanish. Without sustained exposure to the tú-dominant patterns of Mexico, Colombia, or Argentina, Costa Rican Spanish evolved along a different track.
There is also a cultural dimension. Costa Ricans are, in general, a people who value social harmony and mutual courtesy, qualities that run through almost everything in the culture, from how conflict is avoided to how strangers are greeted. Usted, at some point in our history, became the pronoun of universal courtesy. Not deference courtesy. And courtesy, here, is something you extend to everyone: the person you’ve known for thirty years and the person you just met five minutes ago.
The exceptions that prove the rule
Now, none of this means that tú has entirely disappeared. It exists, and it is used, but the way it is used tells you something important. In Costa Rica, switching from usted to tú can actually signal a shift in emotional register. It can mark a moment of particular intimacy, or in some contexts, subtle condescension. Young people, especially those influenced by Mexican and Spanish media, are increasingly comfortable with tú. And in certain expat-heavy areas or international work environments, tú is simply the more common form.
There is also “vos,” the second-person pronoun associated with Argentina and several Central American countries, which exists in Costa Rican speech but in a more limited register, sometimes used between close friends of the same age, sometimes as an intensifier of informality. But vos is a secondary player in most everyday conversations. Usted is the protagonist.
“Mae, ¿y usted cómo está?” — Two close male friends greeting each other on a Monday morning.
Translation: “Dude, how are you?”, The “usted” here carries zero formality. The “mae” (bro) immediately after makes the intimacy unmistakable.
This pairing mae and usted in the same breath is perhaps the clearest illustration of the whole phenomenon. “Mae” is the most casual, warm, slangy word in the Costa Rican vocabulary. “Usted” is, on paper, the most formal pronoun in the Spanish language. And yet they exist side by side, every single day, in exactly this order, without any sense of contradiction. Because for us, there is no contradiction. Both words are doing the same job: making you feel like you belong.
What this means when you’re learning Spanish here
If you are studying Spanish in Costa Rica or trying to communicate with locals in Spanish, this has some practical implications worth keeping in mind. First: do not be alarmed when someone uses usted with you right away. It does not mean they find you intimidating or want to keep you at a distance. It probably means the opposite.
Second: if you arrive using tú because that is what your Spanish course taught you, most Costa Ricans will understand you perfectly and not think less of you. But you may occasionally get a slightly amused look, the look of someone noticing an accent they don’t usually hear. Using usted, even imperfectly, signals that you’ve spent some time paying attention to how people actually speak here. That matters.
Third, and most importantly: do not try to decode the formality level of a relationship based on pronoun choice. It will mislead you every time. The woman who is calling you usted while laughing and patting your arm is not being stiff. The man who is using usted while inviting you to his family’s Sunday lunch is not being formal. He is being exactly as warm as he appears. The pronoun is just the water. The warmth is real.
Language as a mirror of culture
I think about the usted phenomenon sometimes as a kind of compressed cultural biography. In the way Costa Rica uses this word stripping it of its distance, filling it instead with warmth, applying it to children and lovers and best friends, you can see the broader values of the society reflected in miniature. We are a people who take courtesy seriously, who extend respect as a default rather than a reward, who believe that treating someone formally does not have to mean treating them coldly.
In most of the world, formality builds walls. Here, we somehow turned the formal pronoun into a form of embrace. That is, I think, a genuinely beautiful thing one of those quiet features of the culture that you only notice once someone points it out, and that you cannot quite un-notice after that.
My Canadian roommate, by the end of his six months in Costa Rica, was using usted without thinking about it. One afternoon, speaking to a friend back home on video call, he caught himself mid-sentence: “Wait, did I just say usted to you?” He had. He laughed. I told him it meant he was starting to get it. Not the grammar the feeling behind it.
That’s the part that takes a little longer. But once it lands, it changes how Costa Rica sounds and how it feels.