It (pronoun)In Modern English, it is a singular, neuter, third-person pronoun. In Modern English, it has only three shapes representing five word forms: it: the nominative (subjective) and accusative (objective) forms. (The accusative case is also called the "oblique".) its: the dependent and independent genitive (possessive) forms itself: the reflexive form Historically, though, the morphology is more complex. Old English had a single third-person pronoun – from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *khi-, from PIE *ko- "this" – which had a plural and three genders in the singular.
She (pronoun)In Modern English, she is a singular, feminine, third-person pronoun. In Standard Modern English, she has four shapes representing five distinct word forms: she: the nominative (subjective) form her: the accusative (objective, also called the 'oblique'.) form; the dependent genitive (possessive) form hers: the independent genitive form herself: the reflexive form Old English had a single third-person pronoun – from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *khi-, from PIE *ko- "this" – which had a plural and three genders in the singular.
He (pronoun)In Modern English, he is a singular, masculine, third-person pronoun. In Standard Modern English, he has four shapes representing five distinct word forms: he: the nominative (subjective) form him: the accusative (objective) form (also called the oblique case) his: the dependent and independent genitive (possessive) forms himself: the reflexive form Old English had a single third-person pronoun — from the Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *khi-, from PIE *ko- "this" — which had a plural and three genders in the singular.
Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronounsA third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex.
Singular theySingular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs and themselves (also themself, and theirself), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as: "Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Could you please let them know where they can get it?" "My personal rule is to never trust anyone who says that they had a good time in high school." "The patient should be told at the outset how much they will be required to pay.
English personal pronounsThe English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
