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personal pronoun

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personal pronoun

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Also known as gender pronoun, independent pronoun

pronoun that is associated with a particular grammatical personality

Wikidata facts

Subclass of
pronoun
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topic's main category
Category:Personal pronouns
Commons category
Personal pronouns
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via Wikidata · CC0

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as she, it, he). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), 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 (as the English personal pronoun it usually does).

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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “personal pronoun” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.