In English personal pronouns are separate words. Me, you, him, her, us, them are all words that exist on their own. To provide more clarity let’s look at the following sentence Me and you. Both personal pronouns exist and are visible to see. In Darija, there are personal pronouns but they usually attach to words, represented by a suffix. So then, how would you say Me and you in Darija? In order to say this we will need a special letter called ya. Ya is not translated and is only used to connect the second personal pronoun with the conjunction “and”. So in our example to say me and you, this would be
ana wyak
Let’s break down the sentence:
| ana | me |
| w | and |
| ya | construction used to connect “and” and you |
| k | you |
this works with the other personal pronouns as well
| ana wyah | me and him |
| ana wyaha | me and her |
| ana wyana | me and us (doesn’t make sense when said but I included it to illustrate the point) |
| ana wyakum | me and you (plural) |
| ana wyahum | me and them |
You may be asking me, if personal pronouns exist in Darija can we not translate the sentence literally. Well the answer is yes. The sentence would be ana w nta. The problem with this sentence is that it is not really used in day to day conversation so you will rarely hear anyone speaking like this. Ya + personal pronoun can also be used to separate the personal pronoun from the word. For example your book – ktabk, can be rewritten as yak ktab. In the second sentence, the personal pronoun is emphasized, as if the sentence was written as “your book!”.
If anyone is having any problems with personal pronouns, let me know in the comment section. I can write an article that will explain personal pronouns, their forms and how they are used.