As in "we are going out tonight" using a different word for "we" depending on whether you mean "me and some other people" or "you and me (and potentially other people as well)".
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Say Alice is talking to Bob and Carol. Alice, Carol, and Eve will be going out tonight (Girls' Night Out), while all three of them as well as Bob, Dave, and Frank will be going out together later in the week. Is there any language that makes a distinction between a "semi-inclusive" (the former) and "fully-inclusive" (the latter)?– Monty HarderCommented Sep 24, 2015 at 19:15
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Most Austronesian languages distinguish first person plural inclusive and exclusive, and many other things as well. In Acehnese (a Sumatran language), age relative to speaker is more important. The Acehnese pronoun system is in the chart on the second page of this paper.– jlawlerCommented Sep 24, 2015 at 23:38
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9 Answers
Yes, this feature is called clusivity, there are dozens of languages that have it, for example Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay, Hawaiian, etc. This article has a list of such languages together with their inclusive and exclusive forms of "we": Clusivity (Wikipedia).
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And contra WP, it's normal among almost all Australian languages, especially those of the Pama-Nyungan family. Additionally, many of those also have this distinction in the first person dual, e.g. ngali 'we two.INCL' vs ngaliju 'we two.EXCL'. Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 2:51
Malayalam (no relation to Malay), a language spoken in the southern state of Kerala in India has this feature. You use "njangal" to exclude the person spoken to and "nammal" to include that person.
This is called clusivity, and although not found in European languages (AFAIK), it is found in South Asia and Australasia at least.
An example of how this is used (as taken from Fantastic Features We Don't Have In The English Language (YouTube)):
We've just won the lottery!
In English this is unclear - is the listener included? If English had an exclusive/inclusive 'we', then it would be clear if the listener was also one of the winner.
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1I would've commented this instead of doing an answer - but I just made the account now, and thus don't have the ability to comment -_- Commented Sep 23, 2015 at 23:42
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5It's an answer so posting it as an answer was the right thing to do. Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 20:29
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1Somewhat surprisingly for a Slavic language, Russian 1st person plural мы is by default exclusive - if you want inclusive, you'd use "мы с тобой" (for dual), "мы с вами" (for plural or polite dual). I'd hesitate to call these "pronouns", though. Commented Sep 27, 2015 at 13:00
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1It can be found in European languages, see Old English, Old Icelandic, and modern dialects that uses weu'ns and you'ns.– QuidamCommented May 2, 2017 at 11:09
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Also: Gujarati (આપણે /અમે), Marathi (आपण /आम्ही ), Marwari, and Punjabi (ਆਪਾਂ /ਅਸੀਂ )– QuidamCommented May 3, 2017 at 9:13
I haven't got enough reputation to comment, but I must add this link because WALS is such an amazing tool for these type of questions:
Inclusive/Exclusive Distinction in Independent Pronouns
This will show the answer to your question on a map. Explore other features by clicking Features in the menu.
In Vietnamese there are 2 types of "we":
inclusive we: "chúng ta", to address the speaker, the person spoken to, and maybe others if any
exclusive we: "chúng tôi", to address the speaker and others, excluding the person spoken to.
Norwegian Sign Language distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive "we". Apart from that it distinguishes between dual and plural, so there are different signs for:
- we (2 people, listener excluded)
- we (2 people, listener included)
- we (more than 2 people, listener excluded)
- we (more than 2 people, listener included)
I don't know about other sign languages, but I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of distinction was common among them.
Tamil also has this feature.
Nāṅkaḷ kāṭṭil-ukku pōkiṟōm
We, (not including the person being adressed) are going to the forest.
Namma kāṭṭil-ukku pōkiṟōm
We, (including the person being adressed) are going to the forest.
An example from Tagalog:
Pupunta kami sa Disneyland! (We're going to Disneyland, but not you!)
Pupunta tayo sa Disneyland! (We're going to Disneyland, including you!)
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I'm not in a place where I can check, but didn't Old English have 'wit' and 'unc'? Commented Apr 5, 2016 at 19:36
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The first example can cause great distress in many a child :)– FiksdalCommented Jun 4, 2016 at 20:47
In the dialect spoken in southern Pennsylvania, Indiana and northern Kentucky, speakers will use "weuns" to indicate inclusion in first person, and "you-uns" for second person.
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2Yes it should have references, but no need to downvote only for that. A speaker who knows his dialect doesn't always have book references, but it's still interesting. A little search is easy. "You'uns/Yinz= contraction of "you + ones". english.stackexchange.com/questions/69341/…– QuidamCommented May 2, 2017 at 10:24
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1@quidam Nothing in the wiktionary suggests that this is about clusivity. you'uns (or y'all) is a plural-you distinct from a singular-you, and it seems that the 'uns-ending is extended to the other plural pronouns as well. Commented Dec 12, 2018 at 13:56