In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker, the addressee, and others. Put in simple colloquial English, first person is that which includes the speaker, namely, "I", "we", "me", and "us", second person is the person or people spoken to, literally, "you", and third person includes all that is not listed above. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessiverelationships.
Some other languages use different classifying systems, especially in the plural pronouns. One frequently found difference not present in most Indo-European languages is a contrast between inclusive and exclusive "we": a distinction of first-person plural pronouns between including or excluding the addressee.
Honorifics
Many languages express person with different morphemes in order to distinguish degrees of formality and informality. A simple honorific system common among European languages is the T-V distinction. Some other languages have much more elaborate systems of formality that go well beyond the T-V distinction, and use many different pronouns and verb forms that express the speaker's relationship with the people they are addressing. Many Malayo-Polynesian languages, such as Javanese and Balinese, are well known for their complex systems of honorifics; Japanese, Korean and Chinese also have similar systems to a lesser extent.
Effect on verbs
In many languages, the verb takes a form dependent on the person of the subject and whether it is singular or plural. In English, this happens with the verb to be as follows:
I am
you are/thou art
he, she, one or it is
we are
you are/ye are
they are
Other verbs in English take the suffix -s to mark the present tense third person singular. In many languages, such as French, the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject.
Additional persons
The grammars of some languages divide the semantic space into more than three persons. The extra categories may be termed fourth person, fifth person, etc. Such terms are not absolute but can refer depending on context to any of several phenomena. Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts: proximate for a more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third person. The obviative is sometimes called the fourth person. The term fourth person is also sometimes used for the category of indefinite or generic referents, which work like one in English phrases such as "one should be prepared" or people in people say that..., when the grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms. The so-called "zero person" in Finnish and related languages, in addition to passive voice may serve to leave the subject-referent open. Zero person subjects are sometimes translated as "one," but the problem with that is that English language constructions involving one, e.g. "One hopes that will not happen," are rare and could be considered expressive of an overly academic tone to the majority of people, while Finnish sentences like "Ei saa koskettaa" are recognizable to and used by young children in both languages.
