Relative pronouns relate to nouns that you have already mentioned. We have four main examples in Spanish:

  • Que
  • El/la/los/las que
  • Quien
  • El/la/los/las cual(es)

Que is the most frequently used and is considered to be more informal and used more in speech. “Que” must immediately follow the noun; there are no other words or punctuation between the noun and this relative pronoun. E.g. El libro que leí – que is referring to the book; “the book that I read”.
Que can often mean words like that/which/who/whom in English. Often we skip the relative pronoun in English, but we must always include it in Spanish.

Quien refers to people, not things and can be used when there are other words or punctuation between the person/people to whom you are referring. E.g. la mujer, quien habla espanol. The sentence mentions the woman and is followed directly by the comma which means we must use quien instead of que (if the comma was not there, we could in this instance have also used que).

If we include a preposition in front of our relative pronoun, and it refers to a person, it will always be followed by quien as this refers to people and “que” following a preposition can only refer to “things”. E.g. la mujer, de quien hablo – the woman, about whom I am speaking/ who I am speaking about. We are referring to a person with our relative pronoun so following the preposition “de” we must use “quien”. Note, in English that we often finish our sentences with prepositions but this cannot happen in Spanish – you will need to reorder your sentence.

El/la/los/las que or cual(es) must grammatically reflect the noun to which they will refer. El/la/los/las que would be the relative pronoun chose to refer to an object after a preposition, other words or punctuation between the item and the relative pronoun and would reflect the gender and quantity of said object. El/la/los/las cual(es) are less common in spoken Spanish but used regularly in more academic written language and more formal settings. These follow the same rules as el/la/los/las que.