English personal pronouns


The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.

Forms

Unlike nouns which are not inflected for case except for possession, English personal pronouns have a number of forms, which are named according to their typical grammatical role in a sentence:
Possessive pronouns replace the entity that was referred to previously or serve as predicate adjectives. For details see English possessive. As they are pronouns they cannot precede any noun.

Basic

The basic personal pronouns of modern English are shown in the table below.
Other English pronouns which have distinct forms of the above types are the indefinite pronoun one, which has the reflexive oneself ; and the interrogative and relative pronoun who, which has the objective form whom and the possessive whose.
Note that singular they is morphosyntactically plural: it is used with a plural verb form, as in "they laugh" or "they are". See the [|singular they section] for more information.

Archaic and non-standard

Apart from the standard forms given above, English also has a number of non-standard, informal and archaic forms of personal pronouns.
  • An archaic set of second-person singular pronouns is thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself. In Anglo-Saxon times, these were strictly second person singular. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, they began to be used as a familiar form, like French tu and German du. They passed out of general use between 1600 and 1800, although they survive in some English and Scottish dialects and in some Christian religious communities, and in many idioms. For details see thou.
  • In archaic language, mine and thine may be used in place of my and thy when followed by a vowel sound.
  • For the use of me instead of I, see
  • An archaic form of plural you as a subject pronoun is ye. Some dialects now use ye in place of you, or as an apocopated or clitic form of you. See ye (pronoun).
  • A non-standard variant of my is me.
  • Informal second-person plural forms include you all, y'all, youse. Other variants include: yous, you/youse guys, you/youse gals, you-uns, yis, yinz. Possessives may include you guys's, you gals's, yous's, y'all's. Reflexives may be formed by adding selves after any of the possessive forms. See y'all, yinz, yous. Yous is common in Scotland, particularly in the Central Belt area.
  • In informal speech them is often replaced by 'em, believed to be a survival of the late Old English form heom, which appears as hem in Chaucer, losing its aspiration due to being used as an unstressed form.
  • Non-standard reflexive forms ourself and themself are sometimes used in contexts where we and they are used with singular meaning.
  • Non-standard reflexive forms hisself and theirselves/theirself are sometimes used.
  • In some parts of England, the pronoun "hoo" is used as a third person singular pronoun. The exact usage varies by location, as it can refer to a male creature, female creature, or be used as a genderless pronoun depending on where in England it is used.
  • A change from first person singular to plural is used in the royal we.
  • A change from second person singular to first person plural is sometimes used colloquially, but may be perceived as patronizing: "Are we ready for our dinner?" meaning "Are you ready for your dinner?"

Complete table

A more complete table, including the standard forms and some of the above forms, is given below. Nonstandard, informal and archaic forms are in italics.
For further archaic forms, and information on the evolution of the personal pronouns of English, see Old English pronouns.

Generic ''you''

The pronoun you can be used as a generic or indefinite pronoun, referring to a person in general. A more formal equivalent is the indefinite pronoun one. For example, you should keep your secrets to yourself may be used in place of the more formal one should keep one's secrets to oneself.

Gender

Use of ''he'', ''she'' and ''it''

The masculine pronouns, he, him, and his are used to refer to male persons. The feminine pronouns she, her, and hers are used to refer to female persons. It and its are normally used to refer to an inanimate object or abstract concept; however, babies and young children may sometimes be referred to as it. Outside of these very limited contexts, use of it as a pronoun for people is generally avoided, due to the feeling that it is dehumanizing.
Traditionally, in English, if the gender of a person was not known or ambiguous, then the masculine pronouns were often used by default. Increasingly, though, singular they is used in such cases.
Animals are often referred to as it, but he and she are sometimes used for animals when the animal's sex is known and is of interest, particularly for higher animals, especially pets and other domesticated animals. Inanimate objects with which humans have a close relationship, such as ships, cars and countries considered as political, rather than geographical, entities, are sometimes referred to using feminine pronouns such as she and her. This may also be extended to other entities, such as towns.

Singular ''they''

The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they. Even when used with singular meaning, they takes a plural verb: If attacked, the victim should remain exactly where they are. Due to this supposed grammatical inconsistency, use of singular they was discouraged by some grammarians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in favor of using generic he. Since the 1970s, however, this trend has reversed, and singular they now enjoys widespread acceptance.
In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals emerged for some non-binary people, or when the sex or social gender of a person is unknown or unspecified. This is a way of producing gender-neutral language while avoiding other pronouns like he or she, he/she, or s/he.

Gender agreement of genitives

In English, genitive pronouns agree with the gender of the antecedent or referent. This is in contrast to many languages in which such pronouns agree with the gender of the head noun of the NP in which they appear. For example, in She saw her brother, the genitive pronoun her agrees with antecedent she. Both are feminine. In Italian, in contrast, the same sentences is Lei ha visto suo fratello. Here suo is a third-person, singular, masculine genitive pronoun. It agrees with fratello, not with the feminine antecedent lei.

Case usage

As noted above, most of the personal pronouns have distinct case forms – a subjective form and an objective form. In certain instances variation arises in the use of these forms.
As a general rule, the subjective form is used when the pronoun is the subject of a verb, as in he kicked the ball, whereas the objective form is used as the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. For example: Sue kicked him, someone gave him the ball, Mary was with him.
When used as a predicative expression, i.e. as the complement of a form of the copula verb be, the subjective form was traditionally regarded as more correct, but nowadays the objective form is used predominantly, and the use of the subjective in such instances is normally regarded as very formal or pedantic; it is more likely when followed by a relative clause. In some cases the subjective may even appear ungrammatical, as in *is that we in the photograph?.
When a pronoun is linked to other nouns or pronouns by a coordinating conjunction such as and or or, traditional grammar prescribes that the pronoun should appear in the same form as it would take if it were used alone in the same position: Jay and I' will arrive later, but between you and me. However, in informal and less careful usage this rule may not be consistently followed; it is common to hear Jay and me will arrive... and between you and I. The latter type is seen as an example of hypercorrection, resulting from an awareness that many instances of and me are considered to require correction to and I.
Similar deviations from the grammatical norm are quite common in other examples where the pronoun does not stand alone as the subject or object, as in Who said us Yorkshiremen are tight?
When a pronoun stands alone without an explicit verb or preposition, the objective form is commonly used, even when traditional grammarians might prefer the subjective: Who's sitting here? Me.
A particular case of this type occurs when a pronoun stands alone following the word than. Here the objective form is again predominant in informal usage, as would be expected if than were analyzed as a preposition. However traditionally than is considered a conjunction, and so in formal and grammatically careful English the pronoun often takes the form that would appear if than were followed by a clause: they are older than we, but she likes him better than 'me.
For more examples of some of these points, see Disjunctive pronoun.