The Object Personal Pronouns in Portuguese are the words for me, you, him, her, it, us, and them. They are divided into three categories in Portuguese:
- Pronomes Pessoais Complemento Direto (direct object pronouns)
- Pronomes Pessoais Complemento Indireto (indirect object pronouns)
- Pronomes Reflexos/Reflexivos (reflexive pronouns)
These are also referred to as Pronomes Pessoais Oblíquos Átonos. These are the famous clitic pronouns in Portuguese (or should I say infamous). They are a little trickier to learn than the Pronomes Pessoais Retos due to them having positional and special spelling rules.
But, I’ll break it down into smaller steps.
- What's a clitic you ask?
- Direct Object Personal Pronouns in Portuguese
- More examples of Direct Object Pronouns
- Indirect Object Personal Pronouns in Portuguese
- Reflexive Pronouns
- Portuguese Clitic Doubling
- Anchor words ⚓(enclisis, proclisis & mesoclisis)
- Examples of how anchor words⚓ affect clitics
- Practice with these Free Quizzes
- Related Posts for further reading:
What’s a clitic you ask?
A clitic is an unstressed word that usually occurs only in combination with another word, for example, ‘m in I’m (in English). In Portuguese, they always appear next to a verb and are usually hyphenated. Perhaps you’ve seen signs that say “vende-se” before. That hyphenated “se” is an example of a clitic. Another common one is the “me” in “chamo-me“.
And next, you’re going to find out exactly how the Object Personal Pronouns in Portuguese are used. Regarding the division into direct, indirect and reflexive pronouns, the difference is always in the third-person singular and plural. You’ll see this in the various tables below as only the “you(formal)/he/she and it” and the “they/them” pronouns change from table to table.
Direct Object Personal Pronouns in Portuguese
You may see this called or referred to as Pronomes Pessoais Complemento Direto by some teachers/grammar books.
A direct object pronoun is “to what” the action refers/happens to:
What am I buying? The milk. So milk is our direct object. When using a pronoun, it would be “I’m buying it” instead of “I’m buying the milk.” Therefore in Portuguese, we would use the clitic pronoun “o” because “leite” is a masculine noun.
There is one observation I’d like to make which is with the direct object pronoun for “vocês“. Because vocês has mostly replaced “Vós” in everyday speech, there is a tendency to still use the clitic pronoun for “vós” instead of “os/as“. This is so in the Algarve and has been the way I’ve always heard it used.
*there is no specific word for “it” in Portuguese. What we use are the pronouns “he” and “she” and their respective inflections. In this case “o” and “a”.
** also used for the plural of “it”
More examples of Direct Object Pronouns
It’s important to mention that these have specific spelling rules according to what verb conjugation is used. More details coming up next.
Clitic Spelling Rules
Earlier, I mentioned that there were specific spelling rules according to what verb conjugation is used. We will see what they are and how they affect the clitics.
Rule 1 (-lo, -la, -los, -las)
The o, a, os, as will gain the letter “l” when the verb conjugations end in “r”, “s” or “z”. What you do is, drop that final “r”, “s” or “z” before you add the “l” to the clitic. Remember our Portuguese pronunciation rules? Notice that by dropping an “r” or a “z” you have to compensate for the pronunciation Do this by adding an accent to the final vowel (acute for “a” and circumflex for “e”). Nothing is added for “ir” verbs. Let’s have a look:
Conjugations ending in “r”
(all the infinitives and very common)
Conjugations ending in “s”
(common)
We don’t add written accents here because it would change the pronunciation (“aeo” rule – not an official term). And in the case of the “tu” example, it would change the meaning to “comprá-lo” = to buy it. Audio examples:
Let’s look at another one:
Conjugations ending in “z”
(not as common)
Rule 2 (-no, -na, -nos, -nas)
If the verb conjugation ends in “m”, “ão” or “õe”, you’ll need to add an “n” to the o, a, os, as to make -no, -na, -nos, -nas. For example:
If you have any questions be sure to ask here (FB) or here (YT) or send me an email.
Indirect Object Personal Pronouns in Portuguese
You may see this called or referred to as Pronomes Pessoais Complemento Indireto” by some teachers/grammar books and also as pronomes oblíquos átonos.
Indirect object pronouns in Portuguese are the “to whom” the action refers/happens to. In other words, they are the words you need to say things like “to me”, “to us”, to him” etc. The table below will show you what all of them are.
Just like with the direct object pronouns, I’d like to make the same observation. Because vocês has mostly replaced “Vós” in everyday speech, there is a tendency to still use the clitic pronoun for “vós” instead of “lhes“. This is so in the Algarve and has been the way I’ve always heard it used.
To whom am I telling? To Pedro. So Pedro is our indirect object. Using a pronoun it would be “I’ll call him tonight.” In Portuguese, we would use the clitic pronoun “lhe“.
More examples of Indirect Object Pronouns
Reflexive Pronouns
Reflexive pronouns clitics are the same as the direct object pronouns. How they differ from the latter is when we use them as reflexives (which is when the doer and the receiver of the action are the same). This isn’t something you need to dowel on too much as the words are the same. This mainly happens because of specific verbs that are reflexive.
For example, in English we say “I get up”, but in Portuguese, we say “I lift myself up”. As you can see: I’m doing the action to myself. Take care here with direct translations. Note here that what’s reflexive in English isn’t always reflexive in Portuguese and vice-versa.
Note: There are other reflexive pronouns (not many) that are not the same as the direct object pronouns, but that is a subject for another lesson.
Portuguese Clitic Doubling
Doubling of direct and indirect pronouns is something we often use in English (He gave it to me) but it’s less so in Portuguese. It’s used, but not as much as you would in English. So Portuguese people wouldn’t be expecting you to be using them either. You may end up not being understood! Let’s see how it would work in Portuguese. Imagine Ricardo gave Marta some pens:
“Ricardo gave them to her.”
This sentence in Portuguese would result in a merging of the clitics “as“(them) and “lhe“(to her) into “-lhas“:
But most people would probably only use one clitic and say “O Ricardo deu-lhe as canetas” instead. This doubling of clitics also can have a strong dialectal and regional variance. This is similar in English when you think about it. It’s more common to hear “he gave them to her” than “he gave her them”. Additionally, in Portuguese, this sometimes veers off from the standard Portuguese patterns of speech. The far-east Algarvian dialect is a good example of this. For instance, in Monte Gordo you could have heard this said this way:
There are two variances from the standard Portuguese here. One is the use of the pronoun “lhe” before the verb without an anchor word. The second one is repeating the indirect object pronoun in a prepositional pronoun position (a ela = to her). It’s like saying “Ricardo to her gave the pens to her.” in English. But next, I’ll focus on the standard Portuguese clitic doubling that you will come across.
The standard forms of clitic doubling happen when you combine a direct object pronoun with an indirect object pronoun or a reflexive pronoun. So take for instance: if you ask to borrow a book from someone and they tell you they will give it to you tomorrow. This is a good situation where you could have a clitic doubling.
And with clitic doubling you would end up with:
Here are a few more examples:
A
B
| me + o = mo me + a = ma me + os = mos me + as = mas |
Anchor words ⚓(enclisis, proclisis & mesoclisis)
Finally, we arrive at the other difficult thing about the clitics. The first issue most learners face is remembering all of the above. The second thing is also knowing where they go in the sentence. This is something that separates European Portuguese from Brazillian Portuguese in terms of difficulty. We have enclisis, proclisis and in some cases, mesoclisis and Brazillian only has proclisis. What all these complex words mean is that in European Portuguese, the position of the clitic moves depending on whether certain words appear (or not) before them. In Brazillian Portuguese, they don’t. So what are these words? I call them anchor words ⚓ because they “anchor” the clitic before the verb. This is not an official term.
Below I have a table with the most common ones.
| não | no |
| ninguém | no one, nobody |
| nunca | never |
| nada | nothing |
| jamais | never ever |
| onde | where |
| que | what, that |
| como | how |
| quando | when |
| quem | who, whom, whose |
| porque | why, because |
| quanto/quanta/quantos/quantas | how much, how many |
| ainda | still, yet |
| também | also, as well |
| já | already |
| talvez | perhaps |
| sempre | always |
| alguém | someone |
| todo/toda/todos/todas | all |
| bem | well |
| mal | bad, barely, evil |
Examples of how anchor words⚓ affect clitics
When there is an anchor word⚓ and a clitic in a sentence, we often end up with what I call “Yoda Speak” <(°.°)>
Here is a downloadable link with all the previous tables in one file.
Practice with these Free Quizzes
