Korean Nouns and Pronouns - Overview of Pronouns

Overview of Pronouns

For each pronoun there is a humble/honorific and an informal form for first and second person. In the above table the first pronoun given is the humble one, which one would use when speaking to someone older or of high social status. Note that dangsin (당신) is also sometimes used as the Korean equivalent of "dear" as a form of address. Also, whereas uses of other humble forms are straightforward, dangsin must be used only in specific social contexts, such as between two married couples. In that way it can be used in an ironic sense when used between strangers, usually during arguments and confrontations. It is worth noting that dangsin is also an honorific third-person pronoun, used to refer to one's social superior who is not present.

There are two third person pronouns, male and female; however, the female form sounds awkward (due to its similarities with a bad word, 그년), and is mostly used when translating texts from other languages.
Like Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese (and other Mon-Khmer languages), Hungarian (and other Uralic languages), Turkish (and other Turkic languages), Hindi-Urdu, Persian, Armenian, Georgian, Indonesian (and other Austronesian languages), Swahili (and other Niger-Congo languages), Luo (and other Nilo-Saharan languages), Korean originally had only a gender-neutral third person pronoun, geu (그), which could mean she or he. However it has increasingly been interpreted as a "male" pronoun used for both genders. Although in recent years the pronoun geunnyeo (그녀) is slowly gaining ground as a female counterpart due to the influence of translations from European languages, it is almost restricted to specific styles of written language, because Korean generally uses subjectless or modifier+noun constructions.