pronoun

A pronoun is a word or part of speech that stands in for a noun or noun phrase. It is used to avoid repetition and to refer to people, places, or things already mentioned or understood from context. Pronouns carry information about person, number, gender, and case, and their form often changes to reflect that information.

Common types include personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, we, they), with subject forms and object forms (me, you, him, her, it, us, them). Possessive determiners (my, your, his, her, its, our, their) modify nouns, and possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs) stand alone. Reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves) refer back to the subject. Demonstratives (this, that, these, those) point to things; interrogatives (who, what, which, whom, whose) introduce questions; relative pronouns (who, which, that, whom, whose) link clauses; indefinite pronouns (anyone, anything, someone, something, few) refer to non-specific referents.

Pronouns have grammatical case in many languages, especially English, which makes a distinction between subjective and objective forms, and a possessive paradigm. Pronoun-antecedent agreement requires pronouns to match their antecedent in number and person, and sometimes in gender. In English, a pronoun's gender often reflects natural gender, though many languages encode grammatical gender; in modern usage, many people prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as they/them in singular use, or other preferred pronouns.

Usage notes: pronouns must be chosen to reflect the referent's identity when known; precise pronouns can prevent ambiguity and offense. In linguistic analysis, pronouns are a relatively small, closed class with behavior that can differ across languages.