| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
The personal pronouns "I" and "we" are said to be in the first person. The speaker uses this in the singular to refer to himself; in the plural, to speak of a group of people of which he is a member.
The personal pronoun "you" is the second person pronoun. It refers to the person spoken to. You is used in both the singular and plural; the old second person singular pronoun, thou, is archaic in modern English.
All other pronouns and all nouns are in the third person. This person is traditionally defined to be what is spoken of or anything that is not first or second person. People who are neither the speaker nor the person spoken to, and any inanimate objects, are referred to in the third person.
In Indo-European languages, first, second, and third person pronouns are all marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual forms as well, whereas members of some other language families extend the idea further and even have trialIn linguistics, the trial grammatical number is a grammatical number referring to 'three things', as opposed to 'singular' and 'plural'. Trial linguistic structures do not exist in English, nor do dual numbers. pronoun forms. Some languages, especially in Western Europe, distinguish degrees of formality and informality. Common ways of doing this include using the second person plural pronoun as a singular in formal situations (as in FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to); or using an old third person noun, with its third person verb forms, as a second person form of address (as in SpanishThis article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain Spanish is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first langua with the word usted). European languages that exhibit these features of contrasting formality and informality have a T-V distinctionIn sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a language, unlike current English, has pronouns that distinguish varying levels of respect, distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult. The name T-V distinction derives from the commo, named for tu and vous, the informal and formal second person pronouns in French. (See also thou for archaic T-V distinctions in English).
Other languages use different classifying schemes, especially in the plural pronouns. One frequently found difference not present in most Indo-European languages is a contrast between inclusive "we", a first person plural pronoun which includes the person addressed in the group of "us," and exclusive "we", which excludes the person addressed. These languages would use different pronouns, verb forms, or both to translate these two sentences:
Many of the Dravidian languagesThe Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 26 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, as well as certain areas in Pakistan, Nepal, and eastern and central India. Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 milli use these distinctions in grammatical person; they exist elsewhere as well.
Other languages have much more elaborate systems of formality that go well beyond the T-V distinction, and use many different pronouns and verb forms that express the speaker's relationship with the people she addresses. The Japanese languageThe Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. The Japanese name for the language is Nihongo . History and classification Historical linguists do not all agree about the origin of the Japanese language; there are several comp has one well known such system; many Malayo-Polynesian languages have them as well.
In many languages, the verb takes a form dependent on this person and whether it is singular or plural. In English, this happens with the verb "to be".
When "first-person", "second-person", and "third-person" are used as adjectives, they should be hyphenated.