Chinese pronouns (Chinese: 代词/代詞; pinyin: dàicí or Chinese: 代名詞; pinyin: dàimíngcí) differ somewhat from pronouns in English and other Indo-European languages. For instance, there is no differentiation in the spoken language between "he", "she" and "it" (though a written difference was introduced after contact with the West), and pronouns are not inflected to indicate whether they are the subject or object of a sentence. Mandarin Chinese further lacks a distinction between the possessive adjective ("my") and possessive pronoun ("mine"); both are formed by appending the particle 的 de. Some honorifics exist in the language, but modern Chinese, especially in the spoken language, does not express the differing levels of respect that can be seen in Honorific speech in Japanese or Korean honorifics.
A second-person pronoun 祢 mí is sometimes used for addressing deities.
The first-person pronouns 俺 ǎn and 偶 ǒu "I" are infrequently used in Mandarin conversation. They are of dialectal origin. However, their usage is gaining popularity among the young, most notably in online communications.
Traditional Chinese characters, as influenced by translations from Western languages and the Bible in the nineteenth century, occasionally distinguished gender in pronouns, although that distinction is abandoned in simplified Characters. Those traditional characters developed after Western contact include both masculine and feminine forms of "you" (你 and 妳), rarely used today even in writings in traditional characters; in the simplified system, 妳 is rare.