Dutch personal pronouns have different forms depending on gender, number and case. Furthermore, they appear in stressed (also called “full” or “strong”) and unstressed (“reduced” or “weak”) forms. The unstressed forms may be clitics; they are often spelled with an apostrophe.

There are regional variants for all pronoun forms.

As shown in the overview of forms above, the third person plural oblique has three forms which are used varyingly.

The 1st and 2nd person singular refer to the speaker or the hearer, respectively. The 1st person plural means ‘speaker and or more other persons’. It is ambiguous between an inclusive and exclusive interpretation, it can refer to ‘you and me’ or ‘me and somebody else’. The 2nd person plural pronoun addresses the hearer and some other person or persons, whether present in the discourse situation or not. Third person pronouns are used to refer to conceptual entities mentioned or otherwise made salient in the previous discourse. Such entities can be persons, objects or anything else that can be expressed by a noun. In the unmarked case, the referent is first introduced by a noun called the antecedent and later picked up by the pronoun. In the example, the referent, a house, is first referred to by a noun and then by a pronoun. The pronoun agrees with the antecedent noun in gender (neuter) and number (singular).

The use of a pronoun to take up an already established referent is known as anaphoric. Pronouns that precede rather than follow the noun, as in toen hij gegeten had ging Jos weer aan het werk after he had eaten, Jos went back to work, are called cataphoric. Anaphoric or cataphoric usage is different from deictic usage.

If several referents are active in the discourse, the gender or number information on the pronoun can help to pick out the correct referent. In the following example, both the cup and the bowl are possible antecedents for a pronoun, as can be seen in the ambiguous English translation. In Dutch, one noun is neuter and the other common, so the gender of the pronoun disambiguates the sentence.

However, ambiguity resolution by means of gender plays a limited role in actual discourse because an estimated 80% of the Dutch nouns have common gender, which means that situations as the above rarely occur. Moreover, information structure usually makes one referent a better antecedent candidate for a following pronoun than others. Another complicating factor is the striking variation in gender agreement that Dutch exhibits, which makes gender information a weak cue for pronoun resolution.

The full form personal pronouns hij and zij and their case variants can also be used to introduce a new discourse referent. This usage is called deictic. Singling out the intended referent normally requires a pointing gesture. Referents are animate, preferably human.

Deictic pointing to inanimate referents is done by demonstrative pronouns.

Deictic pronouns differ prosodically from anaphoric pronouns: they always carry stress. The neuter personal pronoun cannot be used deictically because it cannot be stressed.

Next to the two major uses, anaphoric and deictic, there are a number of minor uses of personal pronouns. One of them is that the weak second and third person singular pronouns double as reflexive pronouns: ik vergis me I’m mistaken, stel je voor imagine. The same second person pronoun appears in generic reference: je weet nooit wat er gebeurt you never know what happens. The neuter pronoun is used in impersonal constructions such as het regent it’s raining, fixed expressions such as het is tijd it’s time or ik weet het niet I don't know as well as in copular constructions of the type het zijn aardige jongens they are (lit.: it are) nice boys. These and similar uses constitute 98% of the occurrences of het in a written corpus (Romijn 1996). Other constructions allow both the neuter and the masculine pronoun, as in Was dat ’et/’m? Was that it? (the inquiry of a shop assistent whether an order is complete), or indeed both, as in Waar zit ‘et ‘m in? What’s the reason?, lit. Where does it sit him in? Note that such uses are restricted to the weak forms of the pronouns. Yet another example is the use of the first person singular in constructions such as het was me toch een mooi concert boy, what a lovely concert in which the pronoun adds emotional emphasis to the message. In this use, the pronoun resembles a modal particle and often combines with other particles such as toch.