In Spanish, personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for the subject (nominative) or object, and third-person pronouns make an additional distinction for direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative), and for reflexivity as well. Several pronouns also have special forms used after prepositions.
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns, and, like many European languages, Spanish makes a T–V distinction in second person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. Object pronouns can be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis. With clitic pronouns, proclitic forms are much more common, but enclitic forms are mandatory in certain situations. There is significant regional variation in the use of personal pronouns, especially second-person pronouns.
Table of personal pronouns All the personal pronouns used in Spanish are outlined in the table below. Ladino, historically spoken by Sephardic Jews, employs some personal pronouns that have fallen out of use in Spanish.
+ Spanish personal pronouns NumberPersonNominativePrepositionalAccusativeDativeGenitiveComitative Singular 1st / 2nd/ 11 /, 3, 3/, 3 3rd////, 3//, 3 Plural 1st/// 2nd/22/2/2 /, 3, 3/, 3 3rd//, 3/, 3 1 Only in countries with ; Ladino has as the formal form, instead of . 2 Primarily in Spain; elsewhere, is used in the plural regardless of the level of formality. 3 Reflexive may be abbreviated as or . A disused equivalent of / is /.
Subject pronouns
Pronoun dropping and grammatical gender
Spanish is a pro-drop language with respect to subject pronouns. Information contained in verb endings often renders the explicit use of subject pronouns unnecessary and even erroneous although they may still be used for clarity or emphasis: or just = "I do" or just = "They saw"
English subject pronouns are generally not translated into Spanish if neither clarity nor emphasis is an issue. "I think" is generally translated as just unless the speaker contrasts their views with those of someone else or places emphasis on the fact that their views are their own and not somebody else's.
Third-person masculine and feminine pronouns (, , , and ) can refer to grammatically masculine and feminine objects as well as people, but their explicit use as subjects is somewhat uncommon, and restricted to people. The third-person neuter singular pronoun is likewise rarely used as an explicit subject in everyday language, although such usage is found in formal and literary contexts. Quite unusually among European languages, the first- and second-person plural subject pronouns ( and , respectively) inflect for gender: and are used to refer to groups of men (as well as mixed-gender groups), while and are used exclusively to refer to groups of women.
Tú/vos and usted Like French and other languages with the T–V distinction, modern Spanish has a distinction in its second-person pronouns that has no equivalent in modern English. The most basic is the difference between ( in areas with voseo) and : or is the "familiar" form, and , derived from the third-person form "your grace" (), is the "polite" form. The appropriate usage of those forms is fundamental to interpersonal communication.
The usage of and depends on a number of factors, such as the number of people with whom the speaker is talking, the formality or informality of the relationship between the speaker and the other person, the age difference between them, and the regional variation of Spanish.
Using the form to address someone implies that the person addressed is a social superior, someone to whom respect is owed, or someone with whom one does not have a close relationship. In contrast, the use of or implies that the person addressed is an equal, a comrade, a friend, someone with whom one has a close relationship, or a child or other social inferior, including (traditionally) a maid or other household employee. is also used to address God, in parallel with English's otherwise-abandoned use of thou. Usage changed in the 20th century in Spain, and a woman who addressed her mother as using could experience that her children call her and use . Also, in Spain the Falangists and the Communists promoted the tuteo as a sign of worker solidarity.
One can give offense by addressing someone with instead of , similar to inappropriately calling someone by their first name in English; conversely, it can also be awkward to use if would be expected, which suggests too much social distance or implies that the person addressed is being haughty. Spanish has a verb, , meaning to use the familiar form to address a person. If speakers feel that the relationship with the conversant has evolved, sometimes only after a few minutes of conversation, to a point that a shift from to is desirable, they often confirm that by asking if it is acceptable: or is fairly common. In Anglophone countries, that would be roughly analogous to asking if it is acceptable to call someone by their first name.
In the plural, in Spain (other than the Canary Islands and parts of western Andalusia), the usage of the familiar and the polite is identical to the usage of . In the Canary Islands as well as those parts of western Andalusia, in addition to all of Spanish America, is not used except in very formal contexts such as oratory, and is the familiar as well as the polite plural.
The distinction extends to other types of pronouns and modifiers: when using , one must also use the third-person object pronouns (except in some Andalusian dialects) and possessive adjectives: means "you wash yourself" in the familiar singular, while can mean "you wash yourself" in the polite singular, as well as "he/she/it washes himself/herself/itself". means "your house" in the familiar singular, while can mean "your house" in the polite singular, as well as "his/her/their house".
Impersonal pronouns There are several impersonal pronouns in Spanish: (, as well as for women), which declines as a normal third-person pronoun and is treated as such for purposes of conjugation and reflexivity. Many ideas that would be expressed with an impersonal pronoun in English would more often be expressed with so-called constructions in Spanish: "That is not done" (), rather than "You (One) wouldn't do that" (). Impersonal might be a recent phenomenon. It is conjugated with the second-person but is not directed to the listener. According to one scholar, it might have appeared in the Valencian Community around the 1940s.Soler-Espiauba, page 201. It is used very often in speech in Spain:
Reflexive pronouns and intensifiers
The third person is the only person with a distinct reflexive pronoun: se. In the first and second persons, the normal object pronouns are used. Thus, the reflexive forms are:
Singular Plural yo me nosotros/nosotras nos tú/vos te vosotros/vosotras os él/ella/ello/usted se ellos/ellas/ustedes se
The reflexive pronoun is used with pronominal verbs, also known as reflexive verbs. These verbs require the use of the reflexive pronoun, appropriate to the subject. Some transitive verbs can take on a reflexive meaning, such as lavar (to wash) and lavarse (to wash oneself). Other verbs have reflexive forms which do not take on a reflexive meaning, such as ir (to go) and irse (to go away). Some verbs only have reflexive forms, such as jactarse (to boast).
The nominal intensifier in Spanish (equivalent to English "myself", "yourself", "themselves", etc. when used after a noun) is mismo, which in this case is placed after the noun it modifies and behaves like a normal adjective. Thus: Yo mismo lo hice = "I [masc.] myself did it" No entiendo porque necesitas la cosa misma = "I don't understand why you need the thing itself" Dáselo a los hombres mismos = "Give it to the men themselves" A nosotros no nos gustan las chicas mismas = "We don't like the girls themselves" (lit. "The girls themselves don't please us")
Unlike English intensifiers, which are often placed several words after the noun they modify (e.g. "I did it myself"), Spanish intensifiers must come immediately after the noun they modify.
Object pronouns
Object pronouns are personal pronouns that take the function of an object in the sentence. Spanish object pronouns may be both clitic and non-clitic; the clitic form is the unstressed form, and the non-clitic form, which is formed with the preposition a ("to") and the prepositional case, is the stressed form. Clitics cannot function independently and must attach to a host (either a verb or preposition). Clitic pronouns are generally proclitic, i.e. they appear before the verb of which they are the object. Enclitic pronouns (i.e. pronouns attached to the end of the verb (or related word) itself) most often appear with positive imperatives and may appear with infinitives and gerunds as well. In all compound infinitives that make use of the past participle, enclitics attach to the uninflected auxiliary verb and not the past participle(s) itself.
In Spanish, two (and rarely three) clitic pronouns can be used with a single verb, generally one accusative and one dative. They follow a specific order based primarily on person:
1 2 3 4 se teos menos lo, la,los, las,le, les
Thus: Él me lo dio = "He gave it to me" Ellos te lo dijeron = "They said it to you" Yo te me daré = "I will give myself to you" Vosotros os nos presentasteis = "You [pl.] introduced yourselves to us" Se le perdieron los libros = "The books disappeared on him" (lit. "The books got lost to him")
The full and pronominal form of a reduplicated direct object must agree in gender and number: A las tropas las dirige César. = "Caesar directs the troops."
When an accusative third-person non-reflexive pronoun (lo, la, los, or las) is used with a dative pronoun that is understood to also be third-person non-reflexive (le or les), the dative pronoun is replaced by se. Simple non-emphatic clitic doubling is most often found with dative clitics, although it is occasionally found with accusative clitics as well. In a wide area in central Spain, including Madrid, there exists the practice of leísmo; which is, using the indirect object pronoun le for the object pronoun where Standard Spanish would use lo (masculine) or la (feminine) for the object pronoun.
Genitive pronouns Genitive pronouns describe to whom something belongs or of whom (or sometimes what) something is a characteristic or property. They are analogous to English "mine", "yours", "his", "hers", etc., and unlike their English counterparts, they inflect for gender and number according to the thing possessed (not the possessor itself) and are generally used with the definite article: Mi coche es más grande que el tuyo = "My car is bigger than yours" Tu casa tiene más cuartos que la suya = "Your house has more rooms than his/hers/yours/theirs" Estos libros son más interesantes que los vuestros = "These books are more interesting than yours [pl.]" Esas camisas son más pequeñas que las nuestras = "Those shirts are smaller than ours"
After ser, however, the definite article is usually omitted: Este coche es mío = "This car is mine" Esta camisa es suya = "This shirt is his/hers/yours/theirs"
To avoid ambiguity in the meaning of suyo, it may be replaced by de + the appropriate pronoun: Estos pantalones son más largos que los de él = "These pants are longer than his" Esta camisa es de ella = "This shirt is hers"
The neuter article lo can also be used with genitive pronouns to express the concept of "what is mine", "what is yours", "what is his", etc.: lo mío, lo tuyo, lo suyo, etc.
Genitive pronouns are identical in form to long-form possessive adjectives, which may be placed after the noun to place emphasis on the fact of possession.
Old forms Formal vos