Chinese pronouns

Chinese pronouns ( or ) differ somewhat from pronouns in English and other Indo-European languages. For instance, there is no differentiation in the spoken language between "he", "she" and "it" (though a written difference was introduced after contact with the West), and pronouns are not inflected to indicate whether they are the subject or object of a sentence. Mandarin Chinese further lacks a distinction between the possessive adjective ("my") and possessive pronoun ("mine"); both are formed by appending the particle "de". Pronouns in Chinese are often substituted by honorific alternatives.
Personal pronouns.
Development of written gender and object differentiation.
Following the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement in 1919, and to accommodate the translation of Western literature, written vernacular Chinese developed separate pronouns for gender-differentiated speech, and to address animals, deities, and inanimate objects.
Throughout the 1920s, a debate continued between three camps: those that preferred to preserve the preexisting use of without distinction between genders, those that wished to preserve the spoken non-gendered pronoun but introduce a new female pronoun in writing, and those that wished to introduce a differently pronounced female pronoun . The pronoun enjoyed widespread support in the 1920s and 1930s but lost out to after the Chinese Civil War. Currently, written pronouns are divided between the masculine human (he, him), feminine human (she, her), and non-human (it), and similarly in the plural. This distinction does not exist in the spoken language, where moreover "tā" is restricted to animate reference; inanimate entities are usually referred to with demonstrative pronouns for 'this' and 'that'.
Other, rarer new written pronouns in the second person are "nǐ" ( "you, a deity"), "nǐ" ( "you, a male"), and "nǐ" ( "you, a female"). In the third person, they are "tā" ( "it, an animal"), "tā" ( "it, a deity"), and "tā" ( "it, an inanimate object"). Among users of traditional Chinese characters, these distinctions are only made in Taiwanese Mandarin; in simplified Chinese, "tā" () is the only third-person non-human form and "nǐ" () is the only second person form. The third person distinction between "he" () and "she" () remain in use in all forms of written standard Mandarin.
Historic personal pronouns in Sinitic languages.
There are many other pronouns in modern Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese Minnan () "you" and Written Cantonese (keúih deih) "they." There exist many more pronouns in Classical Chinese and in literary works, including (rǔ) or (ěr) for "you", and (wú) for "I" (see Chinese honorifics). They are not routinely encountered in colloquial speech.
Possessives.
To indicate alienable possession, ("de") is appended to the pronoun. For inalienable possession, such as family and entities very close to the owner, this may be omitted, e.g. ("wǒ mā") "my mother". For older generations, ("lìng") is the equivalent to the modern form ("nínde"), as in ("lìngzūn") "your father". In literary style, ("qí") is sometimes used for "his" or "her"; e.g. means "his father" or "her father".
In Cantonese, for possessive, ("ge3") is appended to the pronoun. It is used in the same way as in Mandarin.
In Taiwanese Minnan the character for "your" is (); although this would be pronounced the same as the personal pronoun "lín", it is represented by a different character when used as the equivalent of in Standard Chinese.
Demonstrative pronouns.
The demonstrative pronouns work the same as in English.
The distinction between singular and plural are made by the classifier (gè) and (xiē), and the following nouns remain the same. Usually inanimate objects are referred using these pronouns rather than the personal pronouns (tā) and (tāmen). Traditional forms of these pronouns are: (zhège), (zhèxiē), (nàge), (nàxiē), and tāmen.
Pronouns in imperial times.
In imperial times, the pronoun for "I" was commonly omitted when speaking politely or to someone with higher social status. "I" was usually replaced with special pronouns to address specific situations. Examples include "guǎrén" () during early Chinese history and "zhèn" () after the Qin dynasty when the Emperor is speaking to his subjects. When the subjects speak to the Emperor, they address themselves as "chén" (), or "your official". It was extremely impolite and taboo to address the Emperor as "you" or to address oneself as "I".
In modern times, the practice of self-deprecatory terms is still used in specific formal situations. In résumés, the term "guì" (; lit. "noble") is used for "you" and "your"; e.g., "gùi gōngsī" () refers to "your company". Běnrén (; lit. "this person") is used to refer to oneself.