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Turkish has six subject pronouns, and because the verb ending already names the subject, the pronoun is normally left out — added back only for emphasis or contrast.

What the subject pronouns do

The set is small and fixed: ben, sen, o, biz, siz and onlar. Nothing here is built from a suffix and there is no vowel harmony at work, so each pronoun is simply learned as a whole word.

What makes the pronoun optional is the verb. Every finite verb ends in a marker that names its own subject, so the person is already stated once. Naming it again with a pronoun would state it a second time, which is why Turkish leaves the pronoun out most of the time.

Person and number

The six pronouns line up in a plain three-by-three: first, second and third person, each in a singular and a plural. The grid gives you the whole set at a glance.

Five of the pronouns are single, unanalysable words. The plural of o is the one that is built rather than simply learned: the plural ending attaches to a special stem, giving onlar and not the olar a learner might expect from o on its own.

The six pronouns side by side

o does the work of English "he", "she" and "it" at once: Turkish pronouns carry no grammatical gender, so nothing in the word itself tells you which is meant, and the situation supplies it.

Plural you and polite you

siz does two jobs. It is the plural "you", addressing more than one person, and it is also the polite singular — the form for one person you address formally or with respect, where sen would sound too familiar. So siz can mean "you all" or a respectful "you", and only the setting tells the two apart.

Dropping the subject pronoun

A Turkish verb can stand on its own as a whole sentence. geliyorum means "I am coming" with no pronoun in front of it, because the ending already says the subject is "I". Each person has its own ending — geliyorsun "you are coming", o geliyor "he is coming", geliyoruz "we are coming" — so the subject is never in doubt.

Adding the pronoun back

You put the pronoun back to stress or contrast the subject. Ben geldim throws the weight onto who came — "I was the one who came". With no such contrast in play, spelling the pronoun out sounds stiff: Ben geliyorum, said neutrally, over-marks a subject the ending already gives. The pronoun also has to agree with the verb, so ben geliyor is wrong for "I" — the ending there points to a third person, and it has to be geliyorum.