Dutch possessive pronouns: mijn, jouw, zijn, haar, onze

A possessive pronoun is the word that says who something belongs to: mijn fiets (my bike), haar tas (her bag). In Dutch these words sit in front of the noun, exactly like in English.

There is one possessive word per person, and only one of them ever changes its ending. Learn the list below and you have almost the whole topic.

Apart from ons/onze, none of these take an ending: it is always mijn boek and mijn boeken, haar hond and haar honden, whether the noun is singular or plural, de-word or het-word.

Use onze before a de-word and before any plural; use ons only before a singular het-word. This is the one possessive that changes shape, so it is worth a moment.

1. de-word → onze: de buurt (the neighbourhood) → onze buurt (our neighbourhood).
2. singular het-word → ons: het dorp (the village) → ons dorp (our village).
3. any plural → onze, because every plural is a de-word: onze dorpen (our villages), even though the singular is het dorp.

Dutch has no separate word for its. When the owner is a thing, it reuses zijn (the very word that also means his): Elk land heeft zijn eigen vlag. (Every country has its own flag.) So one form, zijn, does the job of both his and its, while haar is kept for a female owner: Zij pakt haar telefoon. (She picks up her phone.)

Jouw and jullie each have a shorter, unstressed twin, je, used when you are not putting weight on who owns the thing.

• jouw stresses the owner; je is the neutral everyday form: Is dit jouw jas of mijn jas? (Is this your coat or mine?) but Neem je paraplu mee. (Take your umbrella.)
• jullie means your for more than one person: Waar staan jullie fietsen? (Where are your bikes?)
• When jullie is already the subject, Dutch dislikes a second jullie right after it, so the possessive drops to je: say Nemen jullie je fietsen mee? (Are you bringing your bikes?), not jullie fietsen.

In relaxed speech (and casual writing) mijn, zijn and haar often shrink to m'n, z'n and d'r: Hij pakt z'n jas. (He grabs his coat.) These are informal; in the exam and in writing, use the full forms mijn, zijn, haar. To point out who owns something without a following noun (that book is mine), Dutch uses a different set, the independent possessives.

The trap is onze on a het-word. Because onze feels like the default, learners write onze huis and onze plan. A singular het-word takes ons: ons huis, ons plan, ons land (our country). Check the article first: if the noun is het ... and singular, it is ons; otherwise onze. Note that ons is also the object form of we (Hij ziet ons = He sees us); that is a different word covered under subject and object pronouns.