Historically, English also had such a distinction between thou and you, but it has since been lost.

Much
can be learned, however, about how the English system worked in the seventeenth century by examining
the usage of the Quakers, who deliberately flouted the conventions of polite society for religious reasons.
They refused to use honorific titles and deferential forms of address such as your excellency, my lord,
because they were not literally true. The Quakers also rejected the use of you as a polite form of address,
and preferred thou, which to them signalled intimacy and equality.

Although the change to the use of a socially unmarked you is now complete, and thou is reserved only for
some religious contexts, changes are taking place right now in other languages such as Swedish, One
social historian points to this phenomenon as an index of social change in line with the fact that the Social
Democratic Party which dominated the Swedish political scene for nearly six decades of the twentieth
century stressed egalitarian relations in its programs for social, educational, and economic reform. While
there were ambiguities going back a hundred years, people seemed to be even more sensitive in the 1970s
since it was not clear what the new norms were.

In fact, at that time some Swedes reported that their choice of address on some occasions was governed
by whether they felt irritable or cheerful. Of course, linguistic and social systems do not necessarily
change in synchrony with one another. Historically, Old Swedish had only one pronoun of address, the
singular du ‘you’. In the 1600s the plural pronoun I came to be used in address to a single person under
the influence of the Byzantine court. This pronoun is the source of modern Swedish ni when it took on the
plural suffix of the preceding verbform,