French personal pronouns
French personal pronouns (analogous to English I, you, he/she, we, and they) reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well (much like the English distinction between him and her, except that French lacks an inanimate third person pronoun it or a gender neutral they and thus draws this distinction among all third person nouns, singular and plural). They also reflect the role they play in their clause: subject, direct object, indirect object, or other. Personal pronouns display a number of grammatical particularities and complications not found in their English counterparts: some of them can only be used in certain circumstances; some of them change form depending on surrounding words; and their placement is largely unrelated to the placement of the nouns they replace. Overview The second person French has a T-V distinction in the second person singular. That is, it uses two different sets of pronouns: tu and vous and their various forms. The usage of tu and vous depends on the kind of relationship (formal or informal) that exists between the speaker and the person with whom they are speaking and the age differences between these subjects. The pronoun tu is informal and singular, spoken to an individual who is equal or junior to the speaker. The pronoun vous is used in the singular (but with second-person plural verb forms) to speak to an individual who is senior to the speaker or socially "more important" than the speaker. Vous is also used in the plural for all groups of people, whether junior, equal or senior. Subject pronouns As noted above, the personal pronouns change form to reflect the role they play in their clause. The forms used for subjects are called the subject pronouns, subjective pronouns, or nominative pronouns. They are as follows: When the predicate is être ("to be") plus a noun phrase, the pronoun ce (c in elision contexts) is normally used instead of the other third person subject pronouns. For example, « C'est un homme intelligent » ("He is a smart man"), « Ce sont mes parents » ("Those are my parents"). Ce is primarily used as a "neuter" pronoun to refer to events and situations: « J'ai vu Jean hier. C'était amusant. », "I saw John yesterday. It was fun." Neologisms such as iel(le), ille, ul, ol and yul have emerged in recent years as gender-neutral alternatives to the masculine and feminine pronouns, but are not yet considered standard in French despite their use in some speech communities. On The subject pronoun on (from Old French [h]om, homme "man", from Latin homo "human being") is equivalent to the English indefinite pronouns one, you, and they (as in, "One is pleased to see...", "You never know what will...", and "They speak French in..."). It takes third-person singular verb forms in the same way that il and elle do, and is used: In the same way as English "one", "you" and "they", where the subject