Italian Subject Pronouns: The Ones You Are Meant to Drop

The Italian subject pronouns are a five-minute job. There are seven everyday ones and a formal extra, they map almost exactly onto English, and nothing about them is irregular. If that were the whole topic this would be the shortest page on the site.

It is not the whole topic, because Italian mostly leaves them out. A learner who translates straight from English puts io at the front of every sentence, and to an Italian ear that sounds like someone who keeps tapping the table to remind you who is talking. The forms are the easy half. Knowing when not to use them is the half worth your time.

The Italian subject pronouns chart

Look at the verb columns rather than the pronoun column, because that is where the information lives. Six persons, six different endings for parlare, with one collision: lui, lei and Lei share a form. (essere adds a second, using sono for both I and they, and context sorts it out.) The regular endings are laid out properly in Italian verbs, and essere has its own page, but you can already see the principle. The ending tells you who the subject is, so the pronoun is usually saying the same thing twice.

Three details before moving on:

• io is never capitalised in the middle of a sentence. English capitalises I; Italian treats io like any other word.
• loro covers everyone. English has one they, and so does Italian: there is no separate feminine plural, whatever the group is made of.
• lei and Lei are the same word. The capital is a writing convention for the formal you, not a different pronoun, and in speech you can only tell them apart from context.

The rule that matters: leave it out

Italian is what linguists call a pro-drop language. The subject is carried by the verb, so the pronoun is optional, and in a neutral sentence Italians drop it:

Parlo inglese. - I speak English.

Siamo a casa. - We are at home.

Hai tempo? - Have you got time?

None of these needs a pronoun, because none of these endings could belong to anyone else. The -o of parlo can only be I, the -iamo of siamo can only be we, and hai can only be you.

Now add the pronoun: Io parlo inglese. It is perfectly grammatical, and it means something different. The pronoun turns into a spotlight: I speak English, as opposed to someone else in the conversation who does not. Use it neutrally, sentence after sentence, and you sound as though you are permanently correcting a misunderstanding nobody had.

This is the single most reliable tell of an English speaker in Italian. Not the accent, not the vocabulary: the steady drumbeat of io, io, io at the start of each sentence.

When the pronoun comes back

There are five situations where Italians do say the pronoun, and they are worth learning as a list, because between them they cover nearly every real use.

1. Contrast. Two subjects doing different things. This is by far the commonest reason.

Io lavoro, lei no. - I work, she doesn't.

Noi siamo qui, loro sono fuori. - We are here, they are outside.

2. Emphasis, usually after the verb. Here Italian does something English cannot copy word for word. To stress who is doing something, Italians move the pronoun to the end of the sentence, where the weight of the sentence falls:

Pago io. - I'll pay. (Literally: pay I.)

L'ho fatto io. - I did it. (Me, not anyone else.)

English does this with the voice, by leaning on the word I. Italian does it with word order. Pago io at the end of a meal is one of the most useful phrases in the language, and it only works because of this rule.

3. After anche, and with neanche. Me too and me neither need a pronoun to attach to:

Anche io. - Me too.

Neanche lui. - Him neither.

You will hear anch'io just as often in speech, with the vowel swallowed.

4. Standing alone. When there is no verb, the pronoun has to do all the work:

Chi è? Sono io. - Who is it? It's me.

Note the shape: Italian says, in effect, am I, where English says it is me. The verb agrees with io, so it is sono and not è.

5. Genuine ambiguity. Occasionally the ending does not settle who is meant. The formal Lei, the she of lei and the he of lui all share è and parla, so when the conversation has more than one candidate, a pronoun clears it up. Later, in the subjunctive, all three singular persons collapse into one form (che io sia, che tu sia, che lui sia), and there the pronoun often becomes necessary rather than optional. That is a problem for a later chapter; for now, just notice that the rule is about information, not etiquette.

tu or Lei: the formal you

Italian has two ways to say you to one person, and choosing between them is social, not grammatical.

The part that feels strange is the verb. Lei means you, but the verb behaves as though you were talking about a third person, so Lei è molto gentile means you are very kind, even though the same words could also mean she is very kind. Historically it is a politeness strategy that addresses someone indirectly, through a courtesy title, and the verb stayed third person when the title disappeared.

Italians call the choice dare del tu and dare del Lei, to give someone tu or Lei. Among young people, and increasingly at work, tu arrives very quickly. With an older stranger, a doctor, a police officer or in a shop you have not been to before, start with Lei and let the other person offer the switch. Nobody minds being addressed politely; plenty of people mind the reverse.

For more than one person, modern Italian uses voi whether the group is friends or strangers. There is a formal plural Loro, with third-person plural verbs, but outside the most ceremonious restaurants and official letters it has largely gone. In parts of the south you will also hear voi used politely to one person, an older system that survives in family and village speech. Recognise it; do not produce it.

There is no word for it

English needs a subject in every sentence, so it props one up: it is late, it is true, it is me. Italian has no such need, and simply leaves the slot empty:

È tardi. - It is late.

È vero. - It is true.

È un problema. - It is a problem.

The mistake to avoid is reaching for lui or lei to mean it. They mean he and she, and they refer to people (and, in speech, to animals). If you say lei about a car or a house, an Italian will look round for the woman you are talking about.

Egli, ella, esso: the pronouns you can ignore

Older grammars and some textbooks list a second set: egli (he), ella (she), esso and essa (it), and essi and esse (they). These are literary and formal-written pronouns. You will meet them in old novels, legal texts and the odd newspaper editorial, and you should be able to recognise them. You will not hear them in conversation, and using them in speech sounds like reading aloud from a nineteenth-century novel. Learn lui, lei and loro for use, and file the others under reading.

Mistakes English speakers make

Saying io every time. The big one, covered above. If your sentence has a conjugated verb and no contrast, drop the pronoun and see if anything is lost. Usually nothing is.

Using the subject form after a preposition. After con, per, di and the rest, io and tu change to me and te: con me, with me; per te, for you. lui, lei, noi, voi and loro stay the same, which is why learners forget that the first two change. The same goes for comparisons: come me, like me.

Giving Lei second-person endings. It is Lei è, not Lei sei, and Come sta?, not Come stai?, when you are being formal. The pronoun is you in meaning and she in grammar, and you have to hold both facts at once.

Translating it as lui or lei. Leave the subject empty instead.

Saying è me for it's me. It is sono io, because Italian makes the verb agree with the pronoun rather than with an invisible it.

What to do next

Learn the chart in an afternoon, then spend a week doing the opposite of what the chart suggests: say every present-tense sentence without its pronoun and check that the ending still tells the listener who you mean. It always does. Then add pronouns back only for the five reasons above, and Pago io will start sounding natural rather than back to front.

The endings are the real subject markers, so the next useful stop is Italian verbs, followed by essere and avere, the two verbs where the ending is irregular and you have to know it cold. After that, Italian plurals and gender explains why loro does not care what a group is made of while almost everything else in Italian does. The Italian course drills all of it on the words you will actually use.