possessive pronoun

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A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that substitutes for a noun phrase that begins with a possessive determiner (also known as a "possessive adjective"). There are eight possessive pronouns in modern English: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs, and whose, plus the antiquated possessive pronoun thine. The word "its" is, however, rarely used as such (almost always it functions as a "possessive adjective").

Among these, "its" and "whose" are properly distinct from "it's" (a contraction of "it is" or "it has") and "who's" ("who is" or "who has"); however, these and other misspellings with apostrophes ("her's" to mean "hers", etc.) are common.

Some languages express possession by regular declension of the personal pronouns (the equivalents of I, you etc.) in the genitive case, or by using possessive suffixes. In Finnish, for example, minun (literally "I's"), means mine or my.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Genitive case
• Possessive case
• Possessive me
• Possessive suffix