Hindi Patterns

Pronouns

Pronouns are a small set of words (such as I, she, he, you, it, we, or they) that can be used as substitutes for nouns if to whom they refer to is understood in the context.

Personal Pronouns

For example:

• vo chalta hainthey walk
• ye pani haithis is water

2nd Person Pronouns

In Hindi, there are 3 forms of the second person pronoun “you”:

Pronoun	When to Use It
too	Use when you are intimate with the person you are talking to, or if you’re trying to be derogatory, or when referring to God
tum	Use when you are very familiar with the person you are talking to, or when you are talking to someone much younger than you
ap	Use to be respectful

To avoid sounding impolite, it is better to always use ap.

Special Versions of the Personal Pronouns

There is a special set of personal pronouns that you use when the subject performing the verb isn’t doing any real physical action. Meaning, it doesn’t visually appear like they are doing anything.

For example, if you want to say “I want ice cream,” you don’t say “main ice cream chaiye”, you say “mujhe ice cream chaiye.” The verb in this sentence is chanaa, which means to want. You can’t actually see someone “wanting” something, so the term mujhe is used instead of main.

Mujhe is the special version of main for when the verb isn’t a real physical action that you can see.

Let’s take a look at all of these special personal pronouns.

	Singular	Plural
First person	mujheI	humenwe
Second person	tujheyou
	tumenyou
	apkoyou
Third person	ise (near)he, she, it, this	inhen (near)these
	use (far)he, she, it, that	unhen (far)they

Here are a couple more examples with these pronouns:

• mujhe der ho rahi haii am running late
• mujhe India bahut acha lagta haii like India very much

The first sentence is “I am running late.” But the person isn’t actually running, so mujhe is used instead of main.

The second sentence is “I like India very much.” The person likes India, but they aren’t actually physically doing anything, they’re just liking, so mujhe is used instead.

Possessive Pronouns

Possessive pronouns are used in place of pronouns to indicate that the subject possesses something.

Here are the possessive pronouns in English:

In Hindi, the suffix of possessive pronouns change based on the gender and number of the object they possess.

Here is a table of the possessive pronouns in Hindi:

Pronoun	Possessive Pronouns
	Possession is…
	Male Singular	Male Plural	Female Sing. or Plur.
mainI	meramy	meremy	merimy
humwe	humaraour	humareour	humariour
tumyou	tumarayour	tumareyour	tumariyour
apyou	apkayour	apkeyour	apkiyour
ye, vo singular (near, far)he,her,it,this,that	iska, uskahis,her,its	iske, uskehis,her,its	iski, uskihis,her,its
ye, vo plural (near, far)them,those	inka, unkatheir	inke, unketheir	inki, unkitheir

Examples with possessive pronouns:

• ye mera kutta (M)this is my dog
• apka nam (M) kya hai?what is your name?
• vo uski kitaab (F) haithat is his book