Latin Personal Pronouns

Latin Pronouns > Latin Personal Pronouns Table

The table of personal pronouns follows this summary of important points about the cases. If you need more background, be sure to see Details on Latin Personal Pronouns.

Pronouns in the Nominative Case

The Latin personal pronoun is used where in English we use pronouns like I, you, he, she, it, we, and they. These pronouns are in the Nominative Case.

We use the Nominative Case forms when the pronoun is the one doing the action or otherwise serving as the sentence's subject; e.g., "'He' stands in for 'Euripides' in the sentence 'He was the third of the three great Greek tragedians.'"

Oblique Cases

In addition to the subject or Nominative Case, there are the oblique cases. In English we have a bunch of other pronouns, like "him" and "his" that could also be used for replacing "Euripides" in a sentence. "His play about Dionysus was produced posthumously." "Aristophanes depicted him as the son of a chervil-seller." Him and his are used as the object and as the possessor. Latin uses different cases of the same word to show these different (oblique) uses. A full list of these is the declension of that particular personal pronoun, the third person, singular, masculine.

English vs Latin Cases for Pronouns

English has lots of personal pronouns because English has different cases that we don't usually have to be consciously aware of, except in the case of pronouns and "'s".

Latin has all of these cases (subject [Nominative], object [various], possessive [Genitive, usually]) plus more: the object case in Latin is actually more than one case. It includes the Dative, Accusative, and Ablative cases. Another difference is that Latin distinguishes masculine, feminine, and neuter personal pronouns in the plural as well as the singular, whereas in English, we use the generic, gender-neutral "they," "them," and "theirs".

Table of Latin Personal Pronouns

After you look at the table of Latin personal pronouns, try the Latin Personal Pronoun Quiz. If you don't do well on it, perhaps this page with additional information on Latin Personal Pronouns will help. Otherwise, especially if you learn by repetition and motion, as I do, might I suggest writing and re-writing the following table until you learn all the component parts.

Declension of Latin Personal Pronouns