This lesson will delve into personal, possessive, interrogative and reflexive pronouns in Persian, and their usage as a continuation of Lesson 3, and will assist those learning Persian with advancing their sentence-making abilities.

Personal Pronouns

In Lesson 3, we briefly touched on personal pronouns when we went over conjugating hastan and nist. Personal pronouns are almost identical to that of English in terms of functionality, with the exception of the third-person singular pronoun, which is simply U (او). Unlike English, Persian lacks gendered pronouns and is in fact a gender neutral language (e.g: the word prince/princess are the same word, shahzadeh (شاهزاده)).

The six pronouns are as follows:

• I -->  man (من)

• You (informal) --> to (تو)

• He/She --> u (او)

• We --> mā (ما)

• You (formal/plural) --> shomā (شما)

• They -->  ānhā (آنها)

Note that to and shomā may also be used interchangeably when referring to the second person singular, but shomā is considered more polite and formal. As a rule of thumb, shomā is generally more polite and ought to be used more often whilst to can come off as dismissive and even rude if you are addressing someone who's considerably older than you or in a position of respect (teachers, parents, grandparents, etc.)

Pronouns can be omitted at will for the sake of shortening the sentence or just wanting to be informal during a conversation. It is very common to simply omit the pronoun in a sentence, in which case you will have to pay attention to how the verb/noun is conjugated which will then infer the omitted pronoun, which you will learn about in a future lesson.

Possessive Pronouns

Possessive pronouns are added to nouns as enclitics, which makes the noun possessive, as the name suggests. In English, one simply places possessive determiner before the noun (e.g: my orange, your book, his textbook.) In Persian, there are two main ways to make a noun possessive, either adding a possessive pronoun to the end or using ezāfe and then adding a pronoun (will be touched on in a later lesson,) but this is far more common, simpler and generally used.

Demonstrative Pronouns

Demonstrative pronouns are used when referring to things instead of using a noun, like English.

Reflexive Pronouns

Reflexive pronouns are derived from the word khod (-خود), literally meaning "self." The functionality of reflexive pronouns is like that of English with "myself, yourself, himself, herself, etc." The reflexive pronoun is simply formed by adding the personal clitic to the end of khod. 

For the following example, we will be using the spoken examples, but for literary works/writings, use the written form.

• khodam (خودم) --> myself

• khodet (خودت) --> yourself

• khodesh (خودش) --> himself/herself

• etc.