In this text, the social category Gender is discussed in order to interpret the embedding process of Você in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Based on the analysis of 19th and 20th century personal letters, written by educated Brazilians, members of a same Brazilian family (the Pedreira Ferraz-Magalhães family), whose sociolinguistic profiles have been identified (LOBO, 2001), the results of a panel study (LABOV, 1994) are discussed. These are focused on past synchronies of BP, related to the forms of Tu and Você as pronominal subjects. The result is that Você, used informally in Brazilian letters between the 20s and 30s of the 20th Century, is in an advanced stage of linguistic change, this process being led by women. The results of the Tu/Você variation study, performed by Pereira (2012) can be added to this discussion, based on letters written by Brazilians from the distinguished Penna family towards the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. The letters expound Gender as a propelling social category of the embedding of Você in the pronominal system of 19th and 20th century Brazilian Portuguese.
Tu/Você variation; Linguistic change; Gender; Forms of pronominal address; Pronominal system
