Personal Pronouns | The Parts of Speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello grammarians! Let's talk about personal pronouns. But first, let me lay some sentences on you. Jake and I baked a loaf of bread. We baked a loaf of bread. You can learn anything! My friends are cool. They are cool.

Now, I'm gonna circle a few of these words, so the ones I wrote in yellow point them out to you: I, we, you, my, they. These are personal pronouns. They're pronouns that change depending on how you're using them, on whether you're using them as the object of a sentence, as the subject, to show ownership, and so on. But we'll get to those in later videos.

For now, I want to talk about the three basic types of English pronouns. Broadly speaking, there are pronouns about me, pronouns about you, and pronouns about something or someone else. This is an idea called grammatical person. Pronouns about me are first person pronouns, pronouns about you are second person, and pronouns about something or someone else are third person.

So, when I say "I love my dog, Franny," "I" is a first person pronoun. In the sentence "She is an excellent dog," where "she" subs out for Franny, "she" is a third person pronoun. Here is a picture of Franny. I think we can all agree she is perfect. Thank you!

Okay, so what I want to do here is fill out this table with some of the basic pronouns we use to talk about ourselves, divided between singular (that is, one person) and plural (or more than one person). Some first person pronouns are I, me, my, and mine. But what if there's more than one of me? What if I'm part of a group and I want to refer to that group?

Well then, I'd use a plural pronoun like we, us, our, or ours. Second and third person are interesting because they have pronouns that pull double duty. In second person, the singular and plural are identical. Singular second person is you, your, and yours. Plural second person is the same: you, your, and yours.

That is to say, it's the same whether or not you're referring to one person (here in singular) or many people (here in plural). Understanding whether you mean one "you" or a plural "you" depends on context, and it's usually very easy to figure out.

Third person pronouns belong to the most crowded category because the world is full of things and people who are neither me nor you. For singular pronouns, we have she, her, and hers; he, him, and his; they, them, their, and theirs; and it and its. They, like you, can refer to both a single person or multiple people, but it doesn't specify a gender like she and he do.

This is extremely useful. Take note that the word "it" only refers to inanimate objects and sometimes non-human animals, but never to people. A robot? Yes. A person? Not so much.

Now in the plural category, much simpler, we have they, them, their. And similar to singular versus plural, "you" singular versus plural "they" depends on context, and it'll be obvious from the words around it which one you mean.

This is a lot of information to swallow. Pause this if you need to practice saying the different pronouns aloud. Do the exercises on the Khan Academy site or app. This is not the only time I'll be talking about personal pronouns in this course, so we have an opportunity to go deeper, especially if you want to know more about the history of the singular use of "they," which is super cool.

In the meantime, please enjoy this second image of my dog Franny, who is again, as I said, a perfect dog. You can learn anything! Dave it out.