she, irrespective of the gender of the addressee, as the honorifics were feminine nouns) together with the 3rd person singular was also common. See below for Italian which has kept this style. African French In , local languages (such as Baoulé, Dioula, etc.) do not make a distinction between informal or formal pronouns, which reflects on the local usage of French. It is thus uncommon to call an individual . A waiter, shop-keeper or taxi driver can very well call a customer , just like an employee towards a superior. For example, an accountant could call her direct branch manager , but will still use to address the company's CEO. Relationships between men and women are typically less formal than between people of the same gender (a female supermarket worker will more easily say towards a male customer than her male colleague). Even in formal situations (business, politics), the superiors can often be called in a familiar way by subordinates who will use affectionate terms of address such as , , , , for males, , , , for females, instead of the standard and . Superiors reciprocate with terms of address such as , , , . All those terms of address typically exclude the use of "vous". The use is also conditioned to the "level" of French being spoken: using a Standard French code and/or accent (what is called in Ivorian French) will prompt addresses of , whereas code switching to Ivorian French will typically invite a concomitant switch to . Informed local people will still, most of the time, make a conscious effort to use and / when addressing Westerners in formal situations (unless, again, that Westerner talks Ivorian French rather than Standard French). Other groups of foreigners such as other Africans, Asians or Middle-Eastern people are less likely to enjoy that "privilege". The use of , just like the use of and , is thus restricted to very formal situations where Standard French is being used, mostly for the higher class between themselves: managers at a meeting with the CEO, representatives of different political parties, upper-class people who don't know each other at a social gathering. A switching to can still happen as soon as the formal event is over (such as managers getting out of the meeting room) or just after having been introduced to each other—usually simultaneous to a switch from Standard French to