Subject pronouns: eu, tu, ele/ela, nós, vocês, eles/elas

The Core Concept

Subject pronouns tell us who is doing the action in a sentence. English almost always keeps them in place ("I speak"), but Portuguese is more flexible — knowing when and how to use them is what makes you sound natural.

The Complete Pronoun Family

EU (I)

The simplest pronoun — always refers to the speaker.

• Eu sou brasileiro. (I am Brazilian.)

• Eu falo português. (I speak Portuguese.)

TU vs. VOCÊ (you — singular)

This is where Brazilian Portuguese gets interesting.

Everyday conversations

• "Eu sou Maria." (I am Maria.)

• "Você fala português?" (Do you speak Portuguese?)

• "Nós somos brasileiros." (We are Brazilian.)

• "Eles falam inglês." (They speak English.)

• "Ela é professora." (She is a teacher.)

Talking about people

• "Ele é médico." (He is a doctor.)

• "Elas são amigas." (They [feminine] are friends.)

• "Eu e ela somos brasileiros." (She and I are Brazilian.)

• "Vocês são estudantes?" (Are you all students?)

One male in the group → masculine plural

Traditional Portuguese gender agreement uses eles for any group containing at least one male:

• 5 women → elas

• 5 women + 1 man → eles

Keep the pronoun when it helps

1. With você — the verb form is identical to ele / ela, so people usually keep the pronoun to avoid confusion about who's being talked about.

2. When you switch from one subject to another — keeping the new pronoun visible signals the change clearly.

3. For emphasis or contrast — "Eu sou brasileiro" (with the pronoun) lands stronger than "Sou brasileiro".

A note on o senhor / a senhora

These behave like polite 3rd-person forms — they take third-person verbs, just like você. You'll cover them in detail in the Forms of address lesson.

Where did "você" come from?

"Você" began life as the medieval honorific Vossa Mercê ("Your Mercy"), used to address royalty without the over-familiar 2nd person. As people repeated it in everyday speech it shortened — vossa mercê → vossemecê → vosmecê → você. That's why você still triggers third-person verb agreement today: grammatically, you're addressing "Your Mercy", not "you".

Source: Wiktionary — você (etymology).

"A gente" used to just mean "the people"

A gente started out as an ordinary noun phrase meaning the people, and grammaticalized into a full first-person-plural pronoun across the 20th century. Sociolinguistic studies of Brazilian speech show younger speakers strongly favour a gente over nós in casual conversation. Because it is still grammatically a noun, a gente keeps third-person-singular verb agreement (a gente fala) even though it means "we".