Personal pronoun

Target audience: beginners.

All languages1 have a set of [[ pronoun|pronouns]] which let speakers refer to different [[discourse participant|discourse participants]] (speaker, addressee, both, neither). These are called personal pronouns. Some languages, e.g. Spanish, allow you to drop personal pronouns when they are the subject of the verb (see: [[pro-drop ]]). English does not.

(Yo) cant-o
1SG sing-1SG (1st person, singular)
‘I sing.’ (Spanish)

  1. This is controversial. Some linguists have argued that some languages, for example Japanese, do not have personal pronouns. ↩

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