Personal pronoun


Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.
The re-use in some languages of one personal pronoun to indicate a second personal pronoun with formality or social distance – commonly a second person plural to signify second person singular formal – is known as the T–V distinction, from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. Examples are the majestic plural in English and the use of vous in place of tu in French.
For specific details of the personal pronouns used in the English language, see English personal pronouns.

Types and forms

Pronoun vs pro-form

Pronoun is a category of words. A pro-form is a type of function word or expression that stands in for another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context. Pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns.
  1. It's a good idea.
  2. It's raining.
  3. I asked her to help, and she did so right away.
In , the pronoun it "stands in" for whatever was mentioned and is a good idea. In , the pronoun it doesn't stand in for anything. No other word can function there with the same meaning; we don't say "the sky is raining" or "the weather is raining". So, it is a pronoun but not a pro-form. Finally, in , did so is a verb phrase, not a pronoun, but it is a pro-form standing for "help".

Person and number

Languages typically have personal pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons:
  • first-person pronouns normally refer to the speaker, in the case of the singular, or to the speaker and others, in the case of the plural.
  • second-person pronouns normally refer to the person or persons being addressed ; in the plural they may also refer to the person or persons being addressed together with third parties.
  • third-person pronouns normally refer to third parties other than the speaker or the person being addressed.
As noted above, within each person there are often different forms for different grammatical numbers, especially singular and plural. Languages which have other numbers, such as dual, may also have distinct pronouns for these.
Some languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns – those that do and do not include their audience. For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number and clusivity, such as mitripela and yumitripela.
Some languages do not have third-person personal pronouns, instead using demonstratives or full noun phrases. Latin used demonstratives rather than third-person pronouns.
In some cases personal pronouns can be used in place of indefinite pronouns, referring to someone unspecified or to people generally. In English and other languages the second-person pronoun can be used in this way: instead of the formal one should hold one's oar in both hands, it is more common to say you should hold your oar in both hands.

Gender

In many languages, personal pronouns, particularly those of the third person, differ depending on the gender of their antecedent or referent. This occurs in English with the third-person singular pronouns, where he is used when referring to a man, she to a woman, singular they to a person whose gender is unknown or unspecified at the time that the pronoun is being used or to a person who does not identify as either a man or a woman, and it to something inanimate or an animal of unspecific sex. This is an example of pronoun selection based on natural gender; many languages also have selection based on grammatical gender. Sometimes natural and grammatical gender do not coincide, as with the German noun Mädchen, which is grammatically neuter but naturally feminine.
Issues may arise when the referent is someone of unspecified or unknown gender. In a language such as English, it is derogatory to use the inanimate pronoun it to refer to a person, and although it is traditional to use the masculine he to refer to a person of unspecified gender, the movement towards gender-neutral language requires that another method be found, such as saying he or she. A common solution, particularly in informal language, is to use singular they. For more details see Gender in English.
Similar issues arise in some languages when referring to a group of mixed gender; these are dealt with according to the conventions of the language in question.
A pronoun can still carry gender even if it does not inflect for it; for example, in the French sentence je suis petit the speaker is male and so the pronoun je is masculine, whereas in je suis petite the speaker is female and the pronoun is treated as feminine, the feminine ending -e consequently being added to the predicate adjective.
On the other hand, many languages do not distinguish female and male in the third person pronoun.
Some languages have or had a non-gender-specific third person pronoun:
Some of these languages started to distinguish gender in the third person pronoun due to influence from European languages.

Mandarin, for example, introduced, in the early 20th century a different character for she and in 2025 a gender neutral character. The three forms are pronounced identically as he and thus are still indistinguishable in speech.
Korean geunyeo is found in writing to translate "she" from European languages. In the spoken language it still sounds awkward and rather unnatural, as it literally translates to "that female".

Formality

Many languages have different pronouns, particularly in the second person, depending on the degree of formality or familiarity. It is common for different pronouns to be used when addressing friends, family, children and animals than when addressing superiors and adults with whom the speaker is less familiar. Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases ; German, where the third-person plural sie is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where the noun pan and its feminine and plural equivalents are used as polite second-person pronouns. For more details, see T–V distinction.
Some languages, such as Japanese, Korean and many Southeast Asian languages like Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian, have pronouns that reflect deep-seated societal categories. In these languages there is generally a small set of nouns that refer to the discourse participants, but these referential nouns are not usually used, with proper nouns, deictics, and titles being used instead. A speaker chooses which word to use depending on the rank, job, age, gender, etc. of the speaker and the addressee. For instance, in Japanese, in formal situations, adults usually refer to themselves as watashi or the even more polite watakushi, while young men may use the student-like boku and police officers may use honkan. In informal situations, women may use the colloquial atashi, and men may use the rougher ore.

Case

Pronouns also often take different forms based on their syntactic function, and in particular on their grammatical case. English distinguishes the nominative form, used principally as the subject of a verb, from the oblique form, used principally as the object of a verb or preposition. Languages whose nouns inflect for case often inflect their pronouns according to the same case system; for example, German personal pronouns have distinct nominative, genitive, dative and accusative forms. Pronouns often retain more case distinctions than nouns – this is true of both German and English, and also of the Romance languages, which have lost the Latin grammatical case for nouns, but preserve certain distinctions in the personal pronouns.
Other syntactic types of pronouns which may adopt distinct forms are disjunctive pronouns, used in isolation and in certain distinct positions, and prepositional pronouns, used as the complement of a preposition.

Strong and weak forms

Some languages have strong and weak forms of personal pronouns, the former being used in positions with greater stress. Some authors further distinguish weak pronouns from clitic pronouns, which are phonetically less independent.
Examples are found in Polish, where the masculine third-person singular accusative and dative forms are jego and jemu and go and mu. English has strong and weak pronunciations for some pronouns, such as them.

Free vs. bound pronouns

Some languages—for instance, most Australian Aboriginal languages—have distinct classes of free and bound pronouns. These are distinguished by their morphological independence/dependence on other words respectively. In Australian languages, it is common for free pronouns to be reserved exclusively for human referents. Examples of languages with animacy restrictions on free pronouns include Wanyjirra, Bilinarra, Warrongo, Guugu Yimidhirr and many others. Bound pronouns can take a variety of forms, including verbal prefixes, verbal enclitics and auxiliary morphemes. These various forms are exemplified below:
;Free pronoun
;Verb prefix
;Enclitic
;Auxiliary morpheme
;Possessive clitic