Wir Ain Leed — Personal Pronouns

The personal pronouns refer to three sets of people.

The first person refers to the person or persons speaking.

The second person refers to the person or persons spoken to.

The third person refers to the person(s) or thing(s) spoken of.

Personal pronouns singular

The nominative names the subject, and the objectives names the object.

The older forms thoo (second person singular nominative) and thee (second person singular objective) survived in most dialects until the mid-nineteenth century and still exist to some extent in Southern, North Northern and in Insular Scots ('du' and 'dee'). Where thoo and thee are used as the familiar forms employed by parents speaking to children, elders to youngsters, or between friends or equals, while ye or you as the second person formal singular employed when speaking to a superior or when a youngster addresses an elder.

In Shetland thoo may be used with a verb taking the same form for the third person.

The 1 Person singular A is always written with a capital letter.

The plural us is often used instead of the 1st person objective singular me in combination with verbs. Often shortened to 's.

Personal pronoun plural

*We may be pronounced oo [u] in Southern Scots and also be used as an unstressed substitute for us.
**Us [vs,vz, ɪs, ɪz], unstressed [(ə)s, (ə)z], emphatic [hɪz, hvz].
The plural forms of you and ye, youse and yese, which probably originated in Ireland are quite widespread in Scotland.
The unstressed form of thaim is [ðəm].
Thaim is often used indefinitely (not referring to a particular person) to represent 'he', 'them', 'those' and 'whoever'.

When two pronouns, one of which is it come together, it generally follows the other pronoun.

it may be abbreviated to 't.

In eastern dialects when it is abbreviated after a vowel or a voiced consonant it may be pronounced /d/.

When two pronouns of different persons come together, the first person is generally placed first.