Italian Grammar - Pronouns

Pronouns

Italian features a sizeable set of pronouns. Personal pronouns are inflected by person, number and, in the third person, gender. Literary subject pronouns also have a distinction between animate (egli, ella) and inanimate (esso, essa) antecedents, although this is lost in colloquial usage, where lui, lei and loro are used for animate subjects as well as objects, while no specific pronoun is employed for inanimate subjects.

There is also the uninflected pronoun ciò, which is only used with abstract antecedents.

Personal pronouns are normally dropped in the subject, as the conjugation is usually enough to determine the grammatical person. They are used when some emphasis is needed, e.g. sono italiano ("I am Italian") vs. io sono italiano ("I am Italian").

Notes:

• 2nd person nominative pronoun is tu for informal. For formal use, the 3rd person form Lei has been used since the Renaissance: it is used like "Sie" in German, "Usted" in Spanish and "você" in Portuguese. Previously, and in some Italian regions today (e.g., Campania), voi is used as a formal singular, as in the French "vous". The pronouns lei (third-person singular) and Lei (second-person singular formal) are pronounced the same but written as shown. Formal Lei and Loro take third-person conjugations. The formal plural person is very rarely used in modern Italian; the unmarked form is widely used instead Lei was originally an object form of ella, which in turn referred to a honorific of the feminine gender such as la magnificenza tua / vostra ("Your Magnificence") or Vossignoria ("Your Lordship"). Example: "Gino, Lei è un bravo ingegnere. Marco, Lei è un bravo architetto. Insieme, voi sarete una gran bella squadra" "Gino, you are a good engineer. Marco, you are a good architect. Together, you will be a great good team".
• Accusative lo and la elide to l' before a vowel or before h: l'avevo detto ("I had said it"), l'ho detto ("I have said it").
• When accusative pronouns are used in a compound tense, the final vowel of the past participle must agree in gender and number with the accusative pronoun. For example, hai comprato i cocomeri e le mele? ("Did you buy the watermelons and the apples?") - Li ho comprati ma non le ho comprate ("I bought them but I did not buy them "). This also happens when the underlying pronoun is made opaque by elision: l'ho svegliato ("I woke him up"), versus L'ho svegliata ("I woke her up").
• In modern Italian, dative gli (to him) is used commonly even as plural (to them) instead of classical loro. So: "Conosci Luca: gli ho sempre detto di stare lontano dalle cattive compagnie" (You know Luca: I have always told him to stay away from bad companies"). And: "Conosci Luca e Gino: gli ho sempre detto..." (...I have always told them...) instead of "... ho sempre detto loro di stare...".