Personal Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

As a matter of both convenience and economy, languages enable us to replace any noun or name by a pronoun. Personal pronouns appear in different 'persons':

• first person = the speaker (plural: a group to which the speaker belongs)
• 2nd person = the person(s) spoken to
• 3rd person = anyone/anything else

In German, and many other languages as well, there is an additional person: the polite or formal second person. This is used to address anyone to whom one wants to show respect. Students speaking to one another would not use it, but a student and teacher in a classroom probably would use this form to address each other. The forms are the same as the third person plural (!) except that when written the pronoun is capitalized: Sie sind.

We have been using the personal pronouns in our examples of case, because in English some of them follow a case system, distinguishing between the nominative and the accusative or object case: I/me, plural we/us; he/him, she/her, it/it,plural they. In English, only the second person is impoverished - you could be singular or plural, nominative or accusative.

The personal pronouns are declined through the four cases, like nouns, in singular and plural. In the 3rd person singular, the pronoun has the same gender as the person or thing to which it refers. For now, we will only look at the nominative and accusative.