Pronouns

After the Conquest, English retained Old English pronouns, with the exception of the third person plural, a borrowing from Old Norse (the original Old English form clashed with the third person singular and was eventually dropped):

Here are the Old English pronouns.

The first and second person pronouns in Old English survived into Middle English largely unchanged, with only minor spelling variations. In the third person, the masculine accusative singular became 'him'. The feminine form was replaced by a form of the demonstrative that developed into 'sche', but unsteadily—'heyr' remained in some areas for a long time. The lack of a strong standard written form between the 13th and the 15th centuries makes these changes hard to map.

The overall trend was the gradual reduction in the number of different case endings. The accusative case disappeared, but the six other cases were partly retained in personal pronouns, as in he, him, his.