Possessive pronouns
Alternative constructions
Numerals

Personal pronouns

Formally, Irish distinguishes between neutral and emphatic personal pronouns. The neutral group comprises a paradigm with six positions, three in the singular and three in the plural just as in English. The subject forms of these are:

Common case personal pronouns

	Sg.	Pl.
1	mé	sinn, muid(e)
2	tú	sibh
3	sé, sí	siad

Common case emphatic personal pronouns

	Sg.	Pl.
1	mise	sinne
2	tusa	sibhse
3	seisean, sise	siadsan

The third person has s-less forms (eisean, ise, iadsan) which have the same distribution as those of the neutral personal pronouns, i.e. they are used anywhere except in immediately post-verbal position.

Emphatic suffixes are also added to nouns in order to give them rhematic prominence.

Objective case personal pronouns

The ‘objective’ case is what is traditionally called the ‘accusative’ case, i.e. it is the case of direct objects of verbs. For nouns, the objective has the same form as the common case (hence the latter label). For most pronouns it is also identical, but the second person singular pronoun is permanently lenited when the object of a verb, e.g. Chonaic mé thú inné ‘I saw you yesterday’.

The third person personal pronouns lose their initial s- /s-/ when in the objective case, e.g. Thuig sí é ‘She understood him’. They also occur in s-less forms when they do not immediately follow a verb. There are many instances where this happens, e.g. with ‘subordinating and’ structures (also found in Irish English) like the following: Chonaic mé an fear agus é ag teacht amach ón teach ‘I saw the man and he coming out of the house’.

Possessive pronouns