We

This article is about the English personal pronoun. For other uses, see We (disambiguation).

We /wiː/ is the first-person, plural personal pronoun (subject case) in Modern English.

Personal pronouns in standard Modern English

		Singular				Plural
		Subject	Object	Possessive	Reflexive	Subject	Object	Possessive	Reflexive
First		I	me	my	myself	we	us	our	ourselves
Second		you		your	yourself	you		your	yourselves
Third	Masculine	he	him	his	himself	they	them	their	themselves
	Feminine	she	her		herself
	Neuter	it		its	itself

Atypical uses of we

A nosism is the use of 'we' to refer to oneself.

Main article: Majestic plural

A common example is the royal we (Pluralis Majestatis), which is a nosism employed by a person of high office, such as a monarch, earl or pope. It is also used in certain formal contexts by bishops and university rectors. According to legend, the expression was first used in 1169 when the English King Henry II (d. 1189), hard pressed by his barons over an investiture controversy, used the word "we" to mean "God and I..." By reminding his audience that the monarch acted conjointly with the deity, he reasserted his claim to be the ruler by "divine right". (See Rolls Series, 2.12)

In the public situations in which it is used, the monarch or other dignitary is typically speaking, not in his own proper person, but as leader of a nation or institution. Nevertheless, the habit of referring to leaders in the plural has influenced the grammar of several languages, in which plural forms tend to be perceived as deferential and more polite than singular forms. This grammatical feature is called a T-V distinction.

The editorial "we"

The editorial we is a similar phenomenon, in which editorial columnists in newspapers and similar commentators in other media refer to themselves as we when giving their opinions. Here, the writer has once more cast himself or herself in the role of spokesman: either for the media institution who employs him, or more generally on behalf of the party or body of citizens who agree with the commentary.

The author's "we"

Similar to the editorial we is the practice common in scientific literature of referring to a generic third person by we (instead of the more common one or the informal you):

• By adding three and five, we obtain eight.
• We are thus led also to a definition of "time" in physics. — Albert Einstein

"We" in this sense often refers to "the reader and the author", since the author often assumes that the reader knows certain principles or previous theorems for the sake of brevity (or, if not, the reader is prompted to look them up), for example, so that the author does not need to explicitly write out every step of a mathematical proof.

The patronizing "we"

The patronizing we is used sometimes in place of "you" to address a second party, hinting a facetious assurance that the one asked is not alone in his situation, that "I am with you, we are in this together". A doctor may ask a patient: And how are we feeling today? This usage is emotionally non-neutral and usually bears a condescending, ironic, praising, or some other flavor, depending on intonation: "Aren't we looking cute?"^{[citation needed]}, although it need not (eg, "Let us be careful of dingos")^{[citation needed]}

Inclusive and exclusive we

Main article: Clusivity

Some languages, in particular the Austronesian languages, Dravidian languages, and others such as Min Nan and some dialects of Mandarin Chinese, have a distinction in grammatical person between inclusive we, which includes the person being spoken to in the group identified as we, and exclusive we, which excludes the person being spoken to.

About half of Native American languages have this grammatical distinction, regardless of the languages' families. Cherokee, for instance, distinguishes between four forms of "we", following an additional distinction between duality and plurality. The four Cherokee forms of "we" are: "you and I (inclusive dual)"; "another and I (exclusive dual)"; "others and I (exclusive plural)"; and "you, another (or others), and I" (inclusive plural). Fijian goes even further with six words for "we", with three numbers — dual, small group (three or four people), and large group — and separate inclusive and exclusive forms for each number.

In English this distinction is not made through grammatically different forms of we, but rather indirectly, for example through explicitly inclusive phrasing ("we all") or through inclusive "let's". The phrase "let us eat" is ambiguous: it may exclude the addressee, as a request to be left alone to eat, or it may include the addressee, as an invitation to come and eat, together. The latter usage is informal, however, and its contracted form "let's eat" can only be inclusive.

Examples

Inclusive "we":

• We can all go to the villain's lair today.

Exclusive "we":

• We mean to stop your evil plans!

External links

• Baker, Peter S. 'Pronouns'. In Peter S. Baker. The Electronic Introduction to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, c. 5.