This paper focuses on overt impersonal pronouns such as English one and Dutch men in eight Germanic languages (English, Frisian, Icelandic, Danish, Dutch, German, Norwegian and Swedish). Cinque (Linguist Inq 19:521–581, 1988), Egerland (Work Pap Scand Syntax 71:75–102, 2003), a.o., argued that there are two types of impersonal pronouns: one type that can occur in multiple syntactic positions but can only have a generic reading and another type that can have generic and existential readings but can only occur as an external argument. I show, based on novel data from ECM constructions, passives and unaccusatives, that it is not the syntactic position which restricts the distribution of men-type pronouns, but that it is case. English-type pronouns can occur with multiple cases, but can only have a generic inclusive reading. All Dutch-type pronouns can only occur with nominative case and can have multiple impersonal readings. Moreover, I show that Dutch and Swedish allow an existential reading when the pronoun is a derived subject (contra Cinque 1988; Egerland 2003). I propose a direction for this correlation between the different readings and case by assuming different feature make-ups for the pronouns, following Egerland (2003), Hoekstra (J Comp Ger Linguist 13:31–59, 2010), Ackema and Neeleman (A grammar of person. Linguistic inquiry monographs, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2018): one has $$\phi $$ -features and, therefore, always needs to be obligatorily inclusive; men lacks this functional layer and, therefore, has no restriction on its readings. Furthermore, I propose that since men lacks a phi-layer, it is too deficient to project a KP, and thus can only occur with unmarked nominative case.