Kazakh Personal Pronouns

Kazakh grammar for beginners · Four ways to say "you", one word for "he" and "she"

Kazakh has several families of pronoun: words for "this" and "that", question words like "who" and "where", words meaning "everyone" and "nobody". This lesson does the family you need first — the personal pronouns, the words that stand in for the people in a sentence.

There are eight words to learn, and two things to know about them: which of them you may say to whom, and what the third person deliberately does not tell you. That is the whole lesson. What these eight go on to do — turn into endings on other words, take case endings of their own — comes later in the course.

The eight personal pronouns

The four ways to say "you"

Whom you are speaking to	One person	More than one
Plain — a close friend, or someone younger than you	sen (сен)	sender (сендер)
Polite — someone older, or of higher social standing	sız (сіз)	sızder (сіздер)

Two independent choices again, as with the plural: how well you know the person, and how many of them there are. The first and third persons have one word each per column; only the second person fills all four cells.

Turkish makes two of these four distinctions

Turkish has sen for the second person singular and siz for everything else. siz is the second-person plural pronoun, and it is also the word addressed to one person as a mark of respect and courtesy — one form doing two jobs, with the surrounding sentence left to say which.

Kazakh gives each job its own word. sız (сіз) is the polite form addressed to one person and sızder (сіздер) the polite form addressed to several, while sen (сен) and sender (сендер) are the plain pair. So the Kazakh sentence tells you outright what a Turkish sentence leaves you to work out.

Choosing between them is a question about the other person rather than about the language. The plain forms go to a close or intimate friend, or to someone younger than the speaker; the polite forms go to someone older than the speaker or of higher social standing.

ol (ол) does not tell you whether it is a man or a woman

ol (ол) is used for all genders. One word does the work of "he", "she" and "it", and one word, olar (олар), the work of "they" — so there is no choice to make and no form to get wrong when you talk about a person whose gender you do not know.

Turkish behaves the same way: o is defined simply as the word for the third person singular, the person or thing being spoken about.

Keep going

← Body Parts · Possessive →

All Kazakh lessons

• The Alphabet — Read Kazakh without learning Cyrillic
• How the Letters Behave — The things spelling does not tell you
• Turkish ↔ Kazakh Sound Laws — Six rules that unlock hundreds of words for free
• Vowel Harmony — The same system as Turkish — with one simplification
• Numbers — One to a thousand, and what a number does to the word after it
• Days of the Week — Saturday, and the days counted off it
• Months — Twelve names to learn outright
• Seasons — The four, and the weather that comes with them
• The Plural — One suffix, six written shapes
• Body Parts — From the top of the head to the sole of the foot, and the organs in between
• Possessive — The ending goes on the thing owned
• Family and Kinship — Lineages, generational ties, and reciprocal kinship
• The Copula — Saying "I am a teacher" with no verb at all
• Saying What Something Is Not — One extra word, and the personal ending moves onto it
• Asking a Question — One small word at the end, and nothing else moves
• Having and Not Having — No verb "to have" — only "there is" and "there is not"
• Where: the Locative — Location and time: one ending
• Where to: the Dative — Direction, destination, recipient, and purpose
• Where from: the Ablative — Starting points, origins, and standards of comparison
• Whose: the Genitive — Possession, definite noun phrases, and relationships
• What: the Accusative — The thing an action is done to — marked only when it is a particular one
• With: the Instrumental — Who you did it with, and what you did it with
• All Seven Together — What each ending marks, and every shape it takes
• Spatial Postpositions and Relational Nouns — Expressing position, direction and time with postpositions and relational nouns
• Verbs, Infinitives and Commands — From dictionary forms in {{-у}} to bare stems, commands and polite requests
• Simple Present Tense — Habitual actions, general facts and future intentions in {{-а / -е / -й}}
• Simple Past Tense — Witnessed and completed past actions in {{-ды / -ді / -ты / -ті}}
• Distant Past and Past Participle — Experienced past actions in {{-ған / -ген}} and conversational negation with {{жоқ}}
• Habitual Past and the "Used-To" Aspect — Expressing past routines in {{-атын / -етін / -йтын / -йтін}} and habitual participles
• Reported and Narrative Past — Hearsay, indirect evidence and surprise discoveries in {{-ыпты / -іпті / -пты / -пті}}
• The Present Continuous Tense — Ongoing actions and the four auxiliary verbs of physical stance
• Future Tenses — Definite intentions in {{-мақ / -мек}} and probable futures in {{-ар / -ер / -р}}
• Desires, Intentions and Optatives — Expressing wishes in {{-ғым келеді}} and making proposals in {{-айын / -айық}}
• Ability and Inability — Expressing "can" and "cannot" using converbs in {{-а / -е / -й}} and {{алу}}
• Conditionals and "If" Clauses — Real and hypothetical conditions in {{-са / -се}} and counterfactuals with {{еді}}
• Sequential Converbs and Action Chains — Linking consecutive actions in {{-ып / -іп / -п}} without repeating conjunctions
• Causative, Passive and Reflexive Verb Voices — Grammatical voice derivations in {{-дыр / -қыз / -т}}, {{-ыл / -іл}} and {{-ыс / -іс}}
• Necessity, Obligation and Possibility — Expressing "must", "need to" and "might" with {{керек}}, {{қажет}} and {{мүмкін}}
• Verb Differences & False Friends — How common Kazakh and Turkish verbs parted ways over time

---

Home · Grammar courses · About · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Contact