The personal pronouns

Personal pronouns indicate the three grammatical persons. They are inflected according to person, number and case. In the third person singular they are additionally inflected according to gender.

Personal pronouns are inflected as follows.

* Genitive types are rarely used.

Note 1

First-person personal pronouns indicate the speaker, second-person pronouns indicate the person being addressed and third-person pronouns a person other than the speaker and the person being addressed. First-person and second-person personal pronouns refer to people but third-person personal pronouns may or may not refer to people (but also to animals, abstract ideas etc.).

When using a third-person personal pronoun, it is possible that a noun, which has already been mentioned, is omitted.

Note 2

In the German language, the formal/polite and the informal/familiar types can be used in the second person. The formal/polite type is always written with a capital first letter and is usually used when addressing an adult. It expresses politeness, respect or lack of intimacy/familiarity.

In the following table the informal/familiar types and the formal/polite types are presented, in the singular and the plural number. One can easily conclude that the formal/polite types are identical both in the singular and the plural, which means that they remain unchanged, independent of the number of people that are being addressed (one or more).

* Genitive types are rarely used.

Note 3

The pronoun es has a range of functions wider than those of a personal pronoun. For this reason, it will be introduced separately.