Linguistic politeness is intimately connected with social norms. Estoniansociety has gone through considerable change over the last ten years. It hasregained independence and, at the same time, switched from a planned toa market economy as well as from dictatorship to democracy. A decade ismost probably not long enough for linguistic norms to change drastically:as we know, the structure of a language often takes much longer to change.Politeness, however, may to some extent be subject to deliberate influence,as witnessed, for example, by the reform of Swedish du (you, sg.) where therecommendations of some left-wing organisations on the usage of mutualdu (T) have won general social acceptance. It is, thus, not unlikely that change is taking place in Estonian politeness at present....