French personal pronouns (analogous to English I, you, he/she, we, and they) reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well (much like the English distinction between him and her, except that French lacks an inanimate third person pronoun it or a gender neutral they and thus draws this distinction among all third person nouns, singular and plural). They also reflect the role they play in their clause: subject, direct object, indirect object, or other.
Personal pronouns display a number of grammatical particularities and complications not found in their English counterparts: some of them can only be used in certain circumstances; some of them change form depending on surrounding words; and their placement is largely unrelated to the placement of the nouns they replace.
| Function | |||||||
| Number | Person | Disjunctive | |||||
| Singular | 1st | ||||||
| 2nd (informal) | |||||||
| 2nd (formal) | |||||||
| 3rd | / | / | |||||
| / | |||||||
| Plural | 1st (colloquial) | ||||||
| 1st (formal) | |||||||
| 2nd | |||||||
| 3rd | / | / | |||||