Personal pronouns are pronouns that refer to objects of a sentence, usually (but not always), people or animals. They are often used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun phrase. ... An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence predicate. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ...

Correct grammatical usage

In English, it is usual to use personal pronouns when the context is already understood, or could easily be understood by reading the sentences that follow. For example, one does not normally use the word "he" to refer to somebody if the person reading or hearing the sentence does not know to whom you are referring.

In addition, personal pronouns must correspond to the correct gender and number of people or objects being described. Using the word "it" in English to refer to a person, for example, is usually considered extremely derogatory. It is generally not accepted to use a singular version of a pronoun for a plural noun, and vice versa. It has been suggested that natural gender be merged into this article or section. ...

In general, pronouns are used often, since too little of their usage can make a sentence very difficult to read.

In French, pronouns include tu, vous, ils, elles, lui, toi, moi, etc. There are different pronouns used for different genders and numbers of people, and unlike English where "them" and "they" are used for every object whether it is masculine or feminine, in French the plural forms vary according to gender. In addition, in French, different pronouns are used for indirect objects of a sentence than direct objects. The dative case is a grammatical case for nouns and/or pronouns. ... The accusative case of a noun is, generally, the case used to mark the direct object of a verb. ...

English personal pronouns, possessive pronouns and adjectives

The English personal pronouns including nonstandard ones and related pronouns and adjectives are shown below. Reflexive pronouns are used as the object of a sentence when the subject and object match. Possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives are used to show ownership. In some languages, there is a difference between reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns. ... An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence predicate. ... The subject of a sentence is one of the two main parts of a sentence, the other being the predicate. ... A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that attributes ownership to someone or something. ... Headline text hjvhwhatsgm,Possessive adjectives modify nouns. ...

1. The forms of we are also sometimes used with a singular sense. When this is the case, they take a plural verb, but ourselves is often changed to ourself.
2. The only common distinction between singular and plural you is in the reflexive and emphatic forms.
3. In Scotland, yous is often used for the second person plural (particularly in the Central Belt area). However, in some parts of the country, ye is used for the plural you. In older times and in some other places today, ye is the nominative case and you is the accusative case. Some English dialects generalised ye, while standard English generalised you. Some dialects use ye as a clipped or clitic form of you.
4. The forms of they are also sometimes used with grammatically or semantically singular antecedents, though it is a matter of some dispute whether and when such usage is acceptable; see Singular they. When this is the case, they take a plural verb, but themselves with a singular sense is often changed to themself.

English regional dialects sometimes use variant pronouns. Most modern English speakers think of thou as a relic of Shakespeares day The word thou (pronounced IPA with th as in the) is a second person singular pronoun of the English language. ... We is the nominative case of the first-person plural pronoun in English. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ... Standard English is a general term for a form of written and spoken English that is considered the model for educated people by native English speakers. ... In linguistics, a clitic is a word that syntactically functions as a free morpheme, but phonetically appears as a bound morpheme; it is always pronounced with a following or preceding word. ... An antecedent is a preceding phrase or word. ... Singular they, sometimes called epicene they, is the usage in the English language of the gender-neutral third-person plural pronoun they and its inflected forms — they, them, their, theirs, themselves (or themself) — to refer to a single person, often of indeterminate sex, as for example in: Have you ever...

See also a Wikipedia table of personal pronouns.

Distinctions made in pronouns

Pronouns usually show the basic distinctions of person and number (the most common system distinguishing between first, second and third person, and singular and plural number), but they may also feature other categories such as case (nominative we vs. objective us in English), gender (masculine he vs. feminine she in English), and animacy or humanness (human who vs. nonhuman what in English). These can of course vary greatly. The English dialect spoken in Dorset uses ee for animates and er for inanimates. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Narrator. ... In linguistics, the term grammatical number refers to ways of expressing quantity by inflecting words. ... In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ... The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments. ... An objective pronoun functions as the target of a verb, as distinguished from a subjective pronoun, which is the initiator of a verb. ... It has been suggested that natural gender be merged into this article or section. ... Animacy is a grammatical category, usually of nouns, which influences the form a verb takes when it is associated with that noun. ... Dorset (pronounced Dorsit, sometimes in the past called Dorsetshire) is a county in the southwest of England, on the English Channel coast. ...

Some languages distinguish inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns, letting a listener know whether the person addressed is or is not included in "we". For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number (singular, dual, trial, plural) and inclusiveness/exclusiveness, such as mitripela (they two and I) and yumitripela (you two and I). Inclusive we is a pronoun that indicates the speaker, the addressee, and perhaps other people, as opposed to the exclusive we that excludes the addressee. ... Exclusive we is a pronoun that indicates the speaker and perhaps other people, but excludes the addressee, as opposed to the inclusive we that includes the addressee. ... Tok Pisin (tok means word or speech, pisin means pidgin) is the creole spoken in Papua New Guinea (PNG). ...

Slavic languages have two different third-person genitive pronouns (one non-reflexive, one reflexive). For example (in Serbian): The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ... In some languages, there is a difference between reflexive and non-reflexive pronouns. ... The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Å tokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and by Serbs everywhere. ...

Ana je dala Mariji njenu knjigu. = "Ana gave Maria her book." (non-reflexive, that is, Maria's book)

Ana je dala Mariji svoju knjigu. = "Ana gave Maria her book." (reflexive, i.e. Ana's own book)

The pronoun may encode politeness and formality. Many languages have different pronouns for informal use or use among friends, and for formal use or use about/towards superiors, especially in the second person. A common pattern in European languages is the so-called T-V distinction (named after the use of pronouns beginning in t- and v- in Romance languages, as in French tu and vous). In sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language, unlike current English, has pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee. ... The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages, are a subfamily of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people evolving in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire. ...

It is very common for pronouns to show more grammatical distinctions than nouns. The Romance languages have lost the Latin grammatical case for nouns, but preserve the distinction in the pronouns. The same holds for English with respect to its Germanic ancestor. The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages, are a subfamily of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people evolving in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire. ...

It is also not uncommon for languages not to have third-person pronouns. In those cases the usual way to refer to third persons is by using demonstratives or full noun phrases. Latin made do without third-person pronouns, replacing them by demonstratives (which are in fact the source of personal pronouns in all Romance languages). Demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ...

Some languages lack the grammatical category pronoun entirely. Both Japanese and Korean are such languages. In these languages, instead of pronouns, there is a small set of nouns that reference the discourse participants (as pronouns do in other languages). Most often, these referential nouns are not used, and proper personal names, some deictics and titles are used instead. Usually, once the subject is understood, no explicit reference is made at all. In Japanese sentences, subjects are not obligatory, so the speaker chooses which word to use depending on the rank, job, age, gender, etc. of the speaker and the addressee. For instance, 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 ("this officer"). In informal situations, women may use the colloquial atashi, and men may use the rougher ore. In pragmatics (linguistics), deixis (Greek: δειξις display, demonstration, or reference) is a process whereby words or expressions rely absolutely on context. ... A title is a prefix or suffix added to a persons name to signify either veneration, an official position or a professional or academic qualification. ...

Pro-drop languages

In some languages, a pronoun is required whenever a noun or noun phrase needs to be referenced, and sometimes even when no such antecedent exists (cf English it rains). In many other languages, however, pronouns can be omitted when unnecessary or when context makes it clear who or what is being talked about. Such languages are called pro-drop languages. In some cases the information about the antecedent is preserved in the verb (through person/number inflection). A pro-drop language (from pronoun-dropping) is a language where pronouns can be deleted when pragmatically inferable. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ...

It is me

In some languages, a personal pronoun has a form called a disjunctive pronoun, which is used when it stands on its own, or with only a copula, such as in answering to the question "Who wrote this page?" English pronouns used in this way have caused some dispute. The natural answer for most English speakers in this context would be "me" (or "it's me"), parallel to "moi" (or "c'est moi") in French. Some grammarians have argued and persuaded some educators that the correct answer should be "I" or "it is I" because the full sentence would be "It is I who wrote this page." However, since English has lost noun inflection and relies on word order, using the accusative me after the verb be like other verbs seems very natural to modern speakers. The phrase "it is I" historically came from the Middle English "it am I" and the change from am to is was also a step to the fixed word order of SVO. The word copula originates from the Latin noun for a link or tie that connects two different things. ... Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion in 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the... In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is the sequence subject verb object in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges. ...

Personal pronouns of other languages

• Chinese pronouns
• Dutch pronouns
• Esperanto pronouns
• French pronouns
• German pronouns
• Ido pronouns
• Italian pronouns
• Novial pronouns
• Portuguese pronouns
• Spanish pronouns
• Vietnamese pronouns

There are seven basic Chinese pronouns in Vernacular Chinese: Originally, Chinese had no distinction for gender in the second- and third-person pronouns, and no distinction for animacy in the third-person either. ... This page will attempt to outline the grammar of Dutch. ... Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language based on the languages of Europe. ... French has a grammar similar to that of the other Romance languages. ... This article discusses the grammar of the German language, focussing on Standard German. ... Ido (pronounced //), a constructed language, was created to become a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds, easier to learn than any ethnic language. ... Italian grammar is the study of grammar in the Italian language. ... Novial [nov-, new + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed language devised by Professor Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had previously been involved in the Ido movement. ... The pronouns of the Portuguese language have flexions according to their number and, in case of some third person forms, also according to their gender. ... The Spanish language has a range of pronouns that in some ways work quite differently from English ones. ... Vietnamese pronouns are more accurately forms of address. ...

See also

• Pronoun game
• Grammatical person
• Dummy pronoun
• Pro-drop language
• T-V distinction
• Deixis
• French personal pronouns
• Gender-neutral pronoun
• Grammatical gender
• Inclusive and exclusive we