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  • An Austrian business contact I've met briefly on a conference call addresses me in email as Mr Smith rather than using my first name which I'm more used to. Are the Austrians more formal about these things? Should I do likewise and call him Mr Gruber and not Hans?

  • German native speakers would never use the first name for a contact like that unless you'd known them for years (or you'd become friends on holiday or something like that, or you were closely related) and 'drunk to brotherhood' ("Brüderschaft trinken") with them, which means that you address each other in the familiar form ("du") rather than the polite/formal form ("Sie"). It's like tu/vous in French. Obviously, that English doesn't have grammatically-enabled polite forms doesn't mean that you can't be polite in it, it's just done in other ways. It means that there's a barrier to calling people over the age of 18 by their first names or using "du". At school, teachers used "Sie" for us from when we started sixth form, from about 16.

    In the decades that I haven't lived in Germany, this seems to have become loosened somewhat in that people in trendy shops sometimes seem to want to address you as "du" even if you're clearly older, but I spend too little time there to know what the rules or indicators are for how that works.

    You should address him as 'Mr Gruber' (or Dr, as the case may be) and never as Hans, and certainly not as "Herr Gruber" unless you speak German to him. I'm sure many native German-speaking businesspeople are by now very used to doing business with native English speakers and many have been addressed by first names, but it would usually jar and would certainly come across as unprofessional.

  • certainly not as "Herr Gruber"

    Is it a faux pas? It's common in English to use the native form of the honorific for forrins, e.g. Tsar Nikolai and Kaiser Wilhelm, not King, Herr Hitler and Monsieur de Gaulle, not Mister.

  • certainly not as "Herr Gruber" unless you speak German to him

    Interesting to know. I'd probably use Herr Gruber as that's what the German people I dealt with called him, even though the rest of the conversation is in English.

  • What should I do in this case.
    I work for a German company that trades around the world, the boss of our division is Austrian and uses the title Magister (indicating he has a Masters degree). My German colleagues ignore it and refer to him as Herr X.
    I do use the titles Dr and Professor for other colleagues but Magister has no English equivalent and sounds weird when I use it so I use Herr which seems rude.

  • In the decades that I haven't lived in Germany, this seems to have become loosened somewhat in that people in trendy shops sometimes seem to want to address you as "du" even if you're clearly older

    It's like in the UK (or maybe SE specific?) where shop staff and people who are privately selling to you / buying from you can think it's OK to address you as 'mate' in person despite knowing nothing of you.

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