Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns are the words that point directly to the participants in discourse — the speaker (eu “I”, nós “we”), the addressee (tu, vós “you”) and whatever or whoever is spoken about (ele, ela, eles, elas “he, she, they”). In Portuguese a pronoun changes shape according to the syntactic function it performs: one form serves as subject (eu), another as object (me), and yet another after a preposition (mim). Mastering this system means mastering much of the grammar of the Portuguese sentence.

Subject pronouns

The subject forms (also called nominative or straight forms) identify the doer of the verb and govern its agreement in person and number.

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	eu	nós
2nd	tu	vós
3rd	ele / ela	eles / elas

Because the Portuguese verb already marks person in its own ending, the subject pronoun is normally dropped — Portuguese is a null-subject language. One usually says Falo português “(I) speak Portuguese”, not Eu falo português; the pronoun surfaces only to emphasise or contrast the subject (Eu pago, tu esperas “I’ll pay, you wait”).

Unstressed object pronouns

The unstressed (or clitic) forms have no stress of their own and lean phonetically on the verb. They distinguish the direct object (the thing acted upon) from the indirect object (the recipient or beneficiary).

Person	Direct	Indirect
1st sing.	me	me
2nd sing.	te	te
3rd sing.	o / a	lhe
1st pl.	nos	nos
2nd pl.	vos	vos
3rd pl.	os / as	lhes

The third-person forms o, a, os, as change shape for phonetic reasons. After a verb ending in -r, -s or -z, those consonants drop and the pronoun becomes lo, la, los, las (amar + o → amá-lo [ɐˈma lu] “to love him”; fazes + o → fá-lo). After a verb form ending in a nasal diphthong it becomes no, na, nos, nas (dão + o → dão-no “they give it”; põem + as → põem-nas).

When a third-person direct object and an indirect object meet, both unstressed, they contract into a single word: me + o → mo, te + o → to, lhe + o → lho, nos + o → no-lo, vos + o → vo-lo.

The position of the clitic relative to the verb — before it (proclisis), after it (enclisis), or inside the future and conditional (mesoclisis) — follows its own rules, treated in clitic placement. In European Portuguese the default position is enclisis (Chamo-me Ana “My name is Ana”), while words such as não “not”, que “that”, já “already” or todos “all” pull the pronoun in front of the verb (Não me chamo Ana).

Stressed and prepositional pronouns

After a preposition, Portuguese uses the stressed forms. In the first and second persons singular these differ from every other form: mim and ti.

Person	Form	Person	Form
1st sing.	mim	1st pl.	nós
2nd sing.	ti	2nd pl.	vós
3rd sing.	ele / ela / si	3rd pl.	eles / elas / si

The reflexive form si refers back to the subject (Ele trouxe o livro para si “He brought the book for himself”). In European Portuguese si also serves as a polite form of address, the prepositional counterpart of você (É para si “It’s for you”, said to one’s interlocutor).

The forms with com “with”

The preposition com fuses with the pronoun into a dedicated form inherited from Latin:

Summary

Each grammatical person therefore commands three series of forms — subject, unstressed object and stressed/prepositional — chosen according to function in the sentence. Handling them well, in particular the o/a versus lhe distinction and the correct contractions (mo, lho, connosco), is one of the surest marks of a firm command of educated European Portuguese.