Are there languages with no first person?

Question

Fiction is rife with characters who always speak in third person. Often, such characters are portrayed as having a native language or culture that lacks the concept of a first person, and hence they are supposedly unable to grasp the first person when speaking English (or whatever fictional language is being rendered as English). Often such characters don't seem to have problems understanding other English speakers who do freely use the first or second person.

Are there any examples of this in real life? Are there any cultures, whose members are known to have difficulty mastering the grammatical first person when they learn English, even once they learn English at an advanced level? Are there any known pathologies that produce such an effect?

I know there are examples of people who at one time spoke about themselves in the third person, for various reasons. However, to my knowledge these are always either out of choice (ie. the person can speak in the first person, but chooses not to for some reason, such as dramatic effect or politeness) or a trivial lack of competence (ie. the person otherwise understands the first person, and can use when speaking other languages, but happens to have a very rudimentary knowledge of English and avoids first person due to not being familiar with the grammar).

Answer 1

In languages that have no category of person, like Manju or Malay, there are dozens of politeness-specific words meaning "I" and "you", most of them being actually nouns. In such languages the same word can mean both "I" and "you" depending on who says it to whom, e.g. in Manju, when you talk to the Emperor, the word you must use for "you" is han (noun, meaning 'khan'), and when the Emperor addresses you, the word he uses for "I" is also han.

In Malay, when you write a letter to your grandma or grandpa, you use cucunda (noun, meaning 'grandchild') for "I" and nenda (noun, meaning 'grandparent') for "you". But when your grandma writes an answer letter to you, she uses the same 2 words, but with their meaning reversed, nenda for "I" and cucunda for "you".

These things can, naturally, be interpreted in different ways, but I think that languages that have the same words for "I" and "you" have a very vague idea of the 1st person pronoun, if any.

Answer 2

I is one of the Semantic Primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Though NSM researchers have not considered every language in existence, they have studied languages from every large family (and if a language truly did not have this prime it would be one of the more obvious ones,) so I'd consider this decent evidence that this is something every language will have. Note that the primes may be represented by affixes or phrases rather than just single words.

Answer 3

I've found the question interesting and re-read a couple of books today searching for the answer.

The books are full of similar examples - languages with only 2 tenses, languages "with no grammar", etc.

There were NO mentioning of a language without first person. In fact, the closest fact (to the topic) that I've found there was about the Korean, where there are only two persons: the first and non-first (i.e. they don't distinguish second & third).

Edit: As pointed out by @jogloran in the comments, the above statement is probably false. There is some misunderstanding regarding the Korean honorific suffix "si".

Answer 4

Vietnamese comes pretty close. Pronouns in conversation are almost all words for family members. The pronoun used depends on relative age. Speaking to a slightly older woman, for example, I would call myself em (little brother) and she would also call me em; she would call herself chị (big sister) and I would call her chị. So in a typical conversation there is no surface representation of person at all. There is no inflection so no question of verb agreement. I have even been in the situation of me and a Vietnamese speaker both calling each other and ourselves anh (big brother) when the age difference was not yet established.

The English translators of the highly amusing novel Dumb Luck by Vũ Trọng Phụng try to get the effect of this across by having characters speak to their family members using third person kinship terms instead of personal pronouns. I'm not sure whether it seems like that to Vietnamese speakers.

The only exception in ordinary circumstances is tôi / bạn. These are usually translated as I / you, but it's not quite as simple as that. Bạn means 'friend' and it is still used as a noun, so its second person meaning is derived from its primary meaning. I think someone told me that tôi originally meant 'servant' but I can't find any reference to that. Anyway, at a practical level, tôi / bạn do mean first and second person, but in my experience they are rarely used (I haven't been in many extremely formal situations). In most situations there is no need to use tôi / bạn for politeness as the age-relative pronouns express adequate respect. I have used tôi to address a mixed-age group; on the other hand, I can also speak as if addressing the oldest person by using the pronoun that expresses my age relative to that person's.

There are some more obscure pronouns or pronoun-like terms which are used in certain friendship and family situations and do have first- and second-person meanings (whether primary or derived I don't know). My wife has explained them to me but they are quite opaque to foreigners, who are at any rate unlikely to hear or use them. Wikipedia lists mình as a true first person pronoun but I can't agree. I think it's a reflexive with a derived first person meaning -- as in 'me, (my)self and I' -- and I have definitely heard it used as a second person reflexive, for example in an instruction in a meditation lesson: cơ thể của mình 'body belonging to self', i.e. 'your (own) body'.

I know the OP was about first person, but there is further evidence of the minimal appearance of person in Vietnamese in that the third person is represented only by the demonstrative ấy as in anh ấy 'he', literally 'that big brother'. On the other hand, there are words for 'it' and 'they'. Make of that what you will.

Answer 5

The Turkic languages make usually a conversation without using the first person narrative, however they do have the first person. It's an agglunative language where they use suffixes to express themselves. Most of the time they speak in first person without ever using the "I" in the sentences. If they want to emphasize themselves in a conversation then the first person "I" will be used but then again only when they want to distinct themselves in a conversation