Catalan personal pronouns

This article discusses the forms and functions of the personal pronouns in Catalan and Valencian.

The older form vós (with 2nd person plural verb agreement) can be found in some varieties of Catalan, and in contexts like administrative texts.

There exists as well an impersonal subject pronoun hom (unmarked for either gender or number), always used with 3rd person singular verbs, nowadays archaic and only used in writing: The weak pronouns (Catalan: pronoms febles) are proforms that, as the name indicates, do not carry stress.

All of the combinations allowed in the standard language are given in the following table, which also shows the necessary morpho-phonological and orthographic adjustments.

In each cell of the table, the forms are listed in the following order, with the same contextual conditions as explained above for the simple pronouns: In combinations like es + en, the resulting form, pronounced [sən], could be analyzed either as s' + en or as se + 'n.

The orthographic convention in such cases is to place the apostrophe as far to the right as possible: se'n, and not s'en, and similarly for se'ls, me'n, te'm, te'ns, etc.

The combination of el/la with en, however, is written l'en, because there is no such pronoun as le that would justify the spelling le'n.