On Personal Pronouns in Shaoxing Dialect

The personal pronouns in Shaoxing dialect are very complicated in that the dialect has two or three sets of pronouns. This phenomenon may be attributed to two reasons. Firstly, Shaoxing dialect originally has a set of personal pronouns Nong(侬), Ru(汝), Qu(渠) before it takes another set from the northern Mandarin. Secondly, the plural suffix in Shaoxing dialect originally derives from the phrase of liang ge(two), which undergoes phonological combination, weakening and grammaticalization and finally gets mixed with the singular suffix nong(侬) and this in turn adds to the complexity of the personal pronouns in Shaoxing dialect.