Personal Pronouns: Subject and Object Forms

Danish personal pronouns come in two forms each: a subject form for the doer of the action and an object form for everything else. This is the same split English makes between I and me, or they and them — so the concept is already in your bones. This page drills the pairs, shows exactly where each form belongs, and tackles the one genuinely Danish quirk: the capital I that means "you all."

The pairs

Two rows behave differently from the rest. den and det ("it") do not change form at all — the same word serves as subject and object. Everything else has a distinct pair, just like English. A handy memory aid: the object forms of the singular human pronouns all end in a clear vowel or -m/-nde sound — mig, dig, ham, hende — while the subjects are the short jeg, du, han, hun.

The subject form: the doer

The subject form is used when the pronoun is doing the verb — the grammatical subject of the clause. In a Danish main clause this pronoun normally sits right before the verb (or right after it, when something else comes first, because Danish is a V2 language).

Notice the last example: because the sentence starts with i morgen, the subject vi jumps to just after the verb — but it is still the subject form. Word order moved it; case did not change.

The object form: direct object, indirect object, after prepositions

The object form covers three jobs, all of which English handles with its object pronouns too.

Direct object — the thing directly receiving the action:

Indirect object — the recipient or beneficiary. Danish does not need a preposition here when the indirect object comes before the direct object:

After a preposition — this is the one English speakers must watch. Every preposition (til, med, for, hos, om, på, efter…) is followed by the object form. til mig, med dig, for ham, hos hende:

den and det: no case change

The two "it" pronouns are the easy ones for case — they never inflect. Whether it is the subject or sits after a preposition, the form is the same. The only choice you make is den (common gender) vs det (neuter), which is a gender choice, not a case choice:

Choosing between den and det is the subject of its own page; here just note that neither one changes for case.

The capital I: "you all"

This is the feature with no English parallel, and it causes more written mistakes than any other pronoun. The Danish word for you addressed to more than one person is the single capital letter I.

Three things collide here, which is exactly why it confuses English speakers:

1. It looks identical to English I ("me"), but means the opposite end of the conversation — you, plural.
2. Lowercased, it becomes i, the preposition meaning in. So capitalisation is not cosmetic; it changes the word.
3. Its object form is the ordinary lowercase jer — I (subject) pairs with jer (object), the same way vi pairs with os.

Polite De: a footnote

You may meet a capitalised De / Dem / Deres in older or very formal texts — the historical polite "you." It is essentially archaic in modern Danish, where du (singular) and I (plural) address everyone, regardless of status. Recognise it, but do not reach for it. It has its own page.

Common mistakes

Subject form after a preposition. English speakers who translate a subject pronoun directly produce med jeg instead of med mig. Prepositions always take the object form.

Lowercasing the plural "you" (I). Writing i for you all turns it into the preposition "in." This is the single most common written error.

Using capital I where jer is needed. Once "you all" is an object or follows a preposition, it must be the lowercase object form jer, not the subject I.

Wrong object form for she. The object form of hun is hende, not hun. Learners sometimes leave the subject form in object position.

Key takeaways

• Subject form = the doer (jeg, du, han, hun, vi, I, de); object form = everything else (mig, dig, ham, hende, os, jer, dem).
• The object form covers direct objects, indirect objects, and the complement of every preposition — just like English me/him/them.
• den and det ("it") never change for case; the only choice is gender.
• The plural "you" is a capital I as a subject and lowercase jer as an object — and capital I must stay capitalised, or it collapses into i ("in").