Spanish Subject Pronouns

There are many points worth to mention about the subject pronouns in Spanish.

·  Different from English, there are more versions of saying "you". In English, the subject pronoun “you” refers to both singular and plural second person. In addition, it does not matter how much you know the person; whether she/he is older than you or he/she is your boss etc.  In short, whether it is a formal or informal situation, one uses always “you”. In Spanish it is different:

·  The singular form of the subject pronoun “you” is tú. We should use tú for people who we know well. So it is an informal way of saying you in Spanish. There is also a more formal way, and it is “usted”. That means, if we meet a person for the first time or we know him very little, we should use “usted”.

·  The plural form of “you” is also different. And that is “vosotros” or “vosotras”. As you know, in Spanish many things change based on the natural gender. So, the things we should care about are far beyond “he/she”. Same applies here for “vosotros/vosotras”. If you speak to a group of only women, use “vosotras”. In other cases (for groups of only men or of mixed genders), use vosotros. It is also worth mentioning that “vosotros/-as” is used mainly in  Spain and in informal situations. For plural form of you in formal situations, “ustedes” is used in Spain. Our teacher said -she is from Cuba- they use in Latin America “ustedes” in both formal and informal situations.

· While saying “we” in Spanish, again we should take the natural gender into consideration. For example, “nosotras” is similarly for a group of women only. And for the other cases, we should use nosotros.

· Same is valid for “they”. For a group of only females, use “ellas”. In other cases, use “ellos"

· In Spanish, she is “ella” and he is “él”. There is no “it”. Because there is no need for it. Because every noun in Spanish has a gender: feminine or masculine. So, we need to refer to anything always based on its gender. So, we will use either “él” or “ella”

· I summarized the Spanish subject pronouns in the following. Note that, grammatically, “usted“ follows the same rules with “él”, “ella”. That is why in such tables, it is always written in the same line with them. Similarly, “ustedes” follows the same rules with ellos/-as.

Lastly, I would like to say that native Spanish speakers use subject pronouns very rarely unless it is really necessary, for instance in order to exclude a misunderstanding or to make an emphasize. For example, consider one of the first things you've learnt: me IIamo .... It is actually, Yo me IIamo. But they simply drop the subject pronoun Yo and they do it most of the time. 

SINGULAR
yo	I
tú	you (informal)
él/ ella/ usted	he/ she/ you (formal)
PLURAL
nosotros/ nosotras	we (masculine & mixed)/ we (only feminine)
vosotros/ vosotras	you(masculine & mixed)/ you (only feminine) : informal in Spain
ellos/ ellas/ ustedes	they (masculine & mixed)/ they(only feminine) you (formal in Spain, informal and formal in Latin America)