This paper deals with the Spanish form tío/a, which has generated a notable interest over recent years because of its frequent use and pragmatic functions in everyday speech, particularly, in the speech of Spanish youths. Grammatically, it constitutes a kinship noun: its masculine variant, tío, means ‘uncle’, and the feminine, tía, corresponds to ‘aunt’ in English. However, both variants are also commonly used “to designate any person, or as an appellative”, when the “family relationship is interpreted in a figurative sense” (Sanmartín Sáez 2006, 785). In this way, they can function as “familiarizer” vocatives, which “mark the relationship between speaker and addressee as a familiar one” (Leech 1999, 112). According to Stenström (2008, 2014, 32), equivalent forms in English would be man or boy for tío, and girl for tía, but these are used to a much lesser extent than their Spanish counterparts (Stenström 2014, 111). In fact, tío/a has been highlighted as the most employed vocative among teenagers or youths from Madrid (De Latte and Enghels 2021; Jørgensen 2008, 2011; Stenström 2008, 2014; Stenström and Jørgensen 2008). There have also been some recent contributions based on conversational data from Valencia, another of the biggest Spanish cities (Briz 2022; Llopis and Pons 2020); these data were partially printed in Briz and Grupo Val.Es.Co. (2002) and are also currently available in the Corpus Val.Es.Co. 3.0 (Pons, n.d.).