3.7 Personal pronouns

Welcher (which) is an interrogative determiner and has the same endings as dieser. It can be used in the singular and plural:

Welche Partei wählst du dieses Mal? Which party will you vote for this time?

Wenig/wenige (little/few/not much/not many) usually has no ending in the singular, but the endings of dieser in the plural:

Das Flugzeug landet in wenigen Minuten. The plane will be landing in a few minutes. Er hat wenig Zeit. He doesn’t have much time.

PRONOUNS are typically little words which stand for nouns or noun phrases. The PERSONAL PRONOUNS in English and German fall into three groups: First person: the speaker (or a group including the speaker) Second person: the person(s) being addressed Third person: the other person(s) or thing(s) being spoken about. Like nouns, they have special forms to indicate gender (in the third person), plural and case:

person nominative accusative dative

1st

ich I mich mir

2nd du you dich dir singular 3rdmasculine er he ihn ihm feminine sie she sie ihr neuter es it es ihm

plural

1st wir we uns uns 2ndfamiliar ihr you euch euch polite (sg./pl.) Sie you Sie Ihnen 3rd sie they sie ihnen

NB There are genitive forms of the personal pronouns (meiner, deiner, seiner, etc.), but they are rarely used nowadays even in very formal registers.

Er,sie,es

Because words for things can have any of the three genders in German, we find all three used where we would use ‘it’ in English. In the singular, the third person pronouns take their gender from the noun which they refer to.

This means that er, sie and es do not correspond exactly to English ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’. Look carefully at these sentences:

Dein Geldbeutel? Ach, er lag vorhin auf dem Tisch,aber irgendjemand muss ihn weggenommen haben.(der Geldbeutel) Your purse? Oh, it was lying on the table earlier, but someone must have taken it. Die Katze sah die Maus,fing sie und biss ihr den Kopf ab.(die Maus) The cat saw the mouse, caught it and bit its head off [literally: bit off the head from it]. Darf ich Ihr Buch noch eine Woche behalten? Ich habe es noch nicht gelesen.(das Buch) May I keep your book for another week? I haven’t read it yet. Der Prinz sah Dornröschen und küsste es.(das Dornröschen) The prince saw Sleeping Beauty and kissed her.

NB Whether the pronoun is masculine, feminine or neuter in principle depends on grammatical gender, e.g. das Dornröschen is es despite being female (nouns with the diminutive ending -chen are always neuter). Especially in spoken German, however, people often use the pronoun appropriate to the person’s natural gender.

Prepositional adverbs

Personal pronouns are not normally used to refer to things after a preposition. The prepositional adverb (a compound of da(r) PREPOSITION) is used instead:

Ich sitze darauf.

Ich sitze auf ihm. Ich spiele damit.

Ich spiele mit ihm. Ich spreche darüber.

Ich spreche über ihn.

NB dar- is sometimes contracted to dr-, e.g. drunter und drüber. I am sitting on it. I am sitting on him. I am playing with it. I am playing with him. I am talking about it. I am talking about him.

Du/Sie

German distinguishes between familiar and polite forms of the second person pronouns:

du (and its plural ihr) are used

when speaking to children (up to age 14), animals and God between relatives and close friends

between fellow students at college and university between blue-collar workmates

Sie is used in all other instances, in particular

to address adult strangers to address colleagues in middle-class professions, though close colleagues will often use first names and du