Generic you

In English grammar, the personal pronoun '' you'' can often be used in the place of ''one'', the fourth-person singular impersonal pronoun, in colloquial speech.

In

English

The generic ''you'' is primarily a colloquial substitute for ''one''. For instance,
:"Brushing one's teeth is healthy"
can be expressed less formally as
: "Brushing your teeth is healthy."

Generic pronouns in other languages

Germanic

In German, the informal second-person singular personal pronoun ("you")—just like in English—is sometimes used in the same sense as the indefinite pronoun ("one").

In Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, these are also and .

In Dutch the informal second-person singular personal pronoun ("you")—just like in English—is frequently used in the same sense as the indefinite pronoun ("one").

Slavic

In Russian, the second person is used for some impersonal constructions. Sometimes with the second-person singular pronoun , but often in the pronoun-dropped form. An example is the proverb with the literal meaning "if you chase after two hares, you will not catch even one", or figuratively, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".

Uralic

The second-person pronoun can be used in Finnish to replace passive voice, largely due to the influence of (generic) ''you'' in English, but its use is only recommended in spoken or otherwise informal language. A similar formation, though without the pronoun ''sinä'' and therefore only with the second-person possessive suffix ''-si'', can be encountered in some dialects.

Arabic

In Darija (Arabic as spoken in the Maghreb), there are two distinct singular second-person pronouns, one masculine (used when addressing a man) and one feminine (used when addressing a woman); but when used as generic pronouns, the speaker uses the pronoun with the gender corresponding to their ''own'' gender, rather than that of the person they are addressing.Souag, Lameen
Jabal al-Lughat: Impersonal vs. personal "you"
Blog entry, posted 2007 September 9; accessed 2007 October 2.

Japonic

In Japanese, the sentence structure may be adjusted to make the patient of an action, or even the action itself, the topic of a sentence, thus avoiding the use of a pronoun altogether.

See also

*
*
*
*
*
*
* (you all, all of you)

References

Further reading

*''Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage'' (E. Ward Gilman, ed.) Merriam-Webster, 1993.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Generic You
English usage controversies
Grammatical number
Modern English personal pronouns