Hokkien pronouns pose some difficulty to speakers of English due to their complexity. The

Hokkien language The Hokkien () variety of Chinese is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the south-eastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is one of the national languages in T ...

use a variety of differing

demonstrative Demonstratives (abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame ...

and

interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its declarative counterpart "Hannah is ...

pronouns, and many of them are only with slightly different meanings.

Basic personal pronouns

The plural personal pronouns tend to be

nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...

forms of the singular ones.

List of Hokkien personal pronouns

Archaic personal pronouns

Suffixes

Suffixes are added to pronouns to make them plural.

Demonstrative and interrogative pronouns

Usually, Hokkien pronouns are

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the Word stem, stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy'' ...

ed with ''ch-'' for thing or things near the speaker, and ''h-'' for one or ones distant from the speaker. {, class="wikitable" , - !

Pe̍h-ōe-jī (; ; ), also sometimes known as the Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min Chinese, particularly Taiwanese and Amoy Hokkien. Developed by Western missionaries working among the Chinese diaspora in South ...

! Hàn-jī !Meaning , - , ''che'' , 此 / 即 / 這 , this thing (near the speaker) , - , ''he'' , 彼 / 許 , that thing (distant from the speaker) , - , ''tó-chi̍t-ê'' , 佗一个 , which thing(s)? , - , ''chit-ê'' , 此个 / 即个 / 這个 , this (near the speaker) , - , ''chia-ê'' , 遮个 , these (near the speaker) , - , ''hit-ê'' , 彼个 / 許个 , that (distant from the speaker) , - , ''hia-ê'' , 遐个 , those (distant from the speaker) , - , ''chia'' , 遮 , here (near the speaker) , - , ''hia'' , 遐 , there (distant from the speaker) , - , ''tó-ūi'' , 佗位 , where

Basic personal pronouns

List of Hokkien personal pronouns

Archaic personal pronouns

Suffixes

Demonstrative and interrogative pronouns

See also