your
det.belonging to you or related to the person being spoken to. You use this to show that something is yours.
det.the possessive form of the second-person pronoun 'you'. Functions as a possessive determiner rather than a true pronoun.
“Is this your coat?”
“Please make sure you have all your personal belongings before you leave the train.”
“The success of the project depends entirely on your ability to coordinate with the various departments and manage your time effectively during the final week.”
Always placed before a noun or an adjective-noun phrase.
your vs you're — Your shows ownership, while you're is the shortened form of you are.
Learners often confuse the possessive determiner 'your' with the contraction 'you're' (you are).
From Middle English your, youre, ȝour, ȝoure, from Old English ēower, īower (“your”, plural), from Proto-West Germanic iuwar, from Proto-Germanic izweraz. Cognate with Saterland Frisian jou (“your”), Dutch jouw (“your”), German Low German jo, jos (“your”), German euer (“your”, plural), Danish jeres (“your”).
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
For Spanish speakers Spanish 'su' serves both the second person (usted) and the third person (él/ella), so 'your' is used where English needs 'his' or 'her'.
For Mandarin speakers Mandarin lacks the post-alveolar approximant /r/ in the coda position, so speakers frequently substitute it with a neutral schwa /ə/ or omit the rhoticity entirely, pronouncing 'your' as /jɔː/ rather than /jɔːr/.
Mandarin does not distinguish between subject and possessive pronouns through inflection; the possessive is formed by adding the particle '的 (de)' to the pronoun '你 (nǐ)'. Consequently, learners may occasionally substitute the subject pronoun 'you' where the possessive determiner 'your' is required.
For Japanese speakers Japanese marks possession through the genitive particle 'no' (の), which is appended to the personal pronoun 'anata' (あなた) to form 'anata no' (あなたの). Japanese speakers may omit 'your' in contexts where the possessor is implied by the topic of the sentence, as Japanese frequently drops pronouns entirely when the context is clear.