Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today,

we're going to talk about the psychology of pronouns, and then we'll talk about where the alphabet came from.

Working with several colleagues, psychologist James Pena Baker, author of The Secret Life of Pronouns,

found that how we use pronouns and various other function words provides a surprisingly good

assessment of people's psychological states. For example, several studies showed that I Talk

often co-occurs with depression. In examining essays written

by college students, Rude Gortner and Pennebaker found that depressed students used more

eye words than non-depressed students. And in a study looking at the poetry of poets who committed suicide compared to non-suicidal poets,

Sturman and Pennebaker also found higher rates of eye words, which the researchers suggest shows that these poets were more intensely inward or self-focused.

But using more eye words doesn't always mean you're depressed, especially when you're in

social interactions that involve differences in relative status or increased social connectivity.

For example, commiserating with a friend will often bring out the we and you in all of us.

For example, why don't we go have dinner and you

can tell me all about it. But if you're talking to someone about something you need for a project,

you'll likely shift to I. In other words, different contexts require different pronouns,

but a measurable shift in one's pronouns from we to I

appears to signal something about a person's emotional state.

Looking at patterns of how people use pronouns in this way can help us understand how people

deal with the effect of catastrophic or personally challenging events.

For example, by looking at how people used pronouns differently after the 9-11 attacks

in both conversational data and internet chats and posts, researchers discovered that there

was a notable decrease in the use of I pronouns and a corresponding increase in the use of

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