Personal pronouns

Spanish, like Dutch and English, has pronouns for each grammatical person. Note: there's a separate word for you (informal) and you (formal), and in the plural there's even a regional split for 'you all'.

Spanish distinguishes two forms of 'you':

• tú: informal — for friends, family, peers, children.
• usted: formal — for strangers, older people, professional or official contexts. Polite, like a formal 'you'.

Important: usted takes the same verb form as él/ella (third person singular), not the tú-form. Compare: tú hablas (you speak, informal) but usted habla (you speak, formal).

For 'you all' there's a regional difference:

• In Spain, people use vosotros/vosotras for informal 'you all', and ustedes only formally.
• In Latin America, people always use ustedes, both formally and informally — vosotros isn't used there.

Ustedes takes the same verb form as ellos/ellas (third person plural).

In Spanish you see personal pronouns much less often than in Dutch or English, because the verb form itself already shows who the subject is. Hablo español already means 'I speak Spanish' — yo isn't needed.

You mainly use the pronoun to:
- add emphasis: Yo hablo español, pero tú hablas francés.
- avoid confusion, e.g. between él, ella and usted, which share the same verb form.