Relative pronouns | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Grammarians, we're going to talk about relative pronouns today.

What relative pronouns do is they link clauses together, specifically independent and dependent clauses. If you don't know what independent and dependent clauses are, that's okay. Just suffice it to say that these pronouns allow you to staple phrases together.

For example, in the sentence, "The man who sold the world is coming by on Tuesday," the pronoun "who" is the relative pronoun there. It's linking the independent clause "the man is coming by on Tuesday" to the dependent clause "sold the world."

The relative pronouns of English are who, whom, whose, that, and which, and we use them all for different things. We can use who, whom, whose, and that to refer to people, and we can use whose, that, and which to refer to things.

Let me show you. You could say, "The salad that I bought was wilted," but at the same time, I can also use that in this sentence: "The man that I saw smiled." See, I'm using that to refer to him. I could also use who.

But the word which, however, does not play very nicely with people. In the sentence, "The witch who cast the spell is kind," we could use either "the witch who cast the spell" or "the witch that cast the spell" because both that and who work with people. However, which strangely does not.

So we couldn't say, for example, "The witch which owns a cat is cruel." That's just not how the language shook out. Which is not a relative pronoun that applies to people.

These are the relative pronouns of English. This is broadly how they work, and I'm going to get into more specifics in following videos. You can learn anything.