Korean pronouns

Korean pronouns pose some difficulty to speakers of English due to their complexity. The Korean language makes extensive use of speech levels and honorifics in its grammar, and Korean pronouns also change depending on the social distinction between the speaker and the person or persons spoken to.

In general, Koreans avoid using second person singular pronouns, especially when using honorific forms.

(Basically, there are no third person pronouns, but the following have restrictive use in a certain writing genres.)

For each pronoun there is a humble/honorific and an informal form for first and second person. In the above table, the first pronoun given is the humble one, which one would use when speaking to someone older or of high social status. dangsin (당신) is also sometimes used as the Korean equivalent of "dear" as a form of address. Also, whereas uses of other humble forms are straightforward, dangsin must be used only in specific social contexts, such as between two married partners. In that way, it can be used in an ironic sense when used between strangers, usually during arguments and confrontations. It is worth noting that dangsin is also an honorific third-person pronoun, used to refer to one's social superior who is not present.

Basically, there are no pure third-person pronoun systems in Korean. Instead of pronouns, personal names, titles, or kinship terms are used to refer to third persons in both oral and written communication. For this reason, repetitive use of names or titles in a discourse is allowed in Korean, which is very different feature from other languages such as English. For translation and creative writing, there is restrictive use of third-person pronouns "geu-nyeo" (그녀) and "geu" (그). The first has been coined in the combination of the demonstrative "geu" (그) [geu] 'that' and 녀(nyeo) 'woman to refer anaphorically to a third person female. A gender-neutral third person pronoun, geu (그), which was originally a demonstrative, meaning 'that' could mean she or he. However, it has increasingly been interpreted as a "male" pronoun.

Although, in recent years, the pronoun geu-nyeo (그녀) is slowly gaining ground as a female counterpart from the influence of translations from European languages, it is almost restricted to specific styles of written language because Korean generally uses subjectless or modifier+noun constructions.

Korean has personal pronouns for the 1st and 2nd person, with distinctions for honorifics, and it prefers demonstrative pronouns in the 3rd person, which make a three-way distinction between close, distant, and previously mentioned.

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