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Why is it “Who do you help?,” not “Whom do you help?”?

English Language & Usage Asked on September 2, 2021

I happened to watch a lecturer was explaining word order of English in the beginners’ English learning course in NHK’s – Japan’s largest and publicly-owned broadcasting network – educational TV program (aired on July 23rd). He showed four cubes, each of which showing the word, “Who”, “You” “Help” “Do” placed at random, and asked students to put the cubes in the right order:

Right answer: Who Do You Help?

I was comfortable with “Who do you help (speak / give / write, and so on) too, but a question arose:

Is “Whom do you help?” grammatically wrong or, obsolete? If so, why is it wrong, how and around when it became obsolete?

I’ve never seriously thought of such question as the declension of a dative pronoun in interrogative form until I hit upon the above TV scene. Taking advantage of this opportunity, I ventured to post a beginner’s question.

4 Answers

Answered by L. Scott Johnson on September 2, 2021

It is grammatically correct. In spoken English in Ireland and the UK it is actually over-correct and can sound either pedantic or ironic. In the U.S. and Australia, however, I've been told it is more commonly used in speech.

Answered by S Conroy on September 2, 2021

In a comment, John Lawler wrote:

They're both grammatical, but the use of whom has declined in modern English, to the point where substantial portions of the speech community actually follow different rules for its use because they use it so seldom. Since Anglophone schools teach their students nothing about English grammar (except what to avoid, for no reason anybody ever mentions), people have pretty much given it up as too much trouble. Consider: when you start a clause with whom, you're announcing that an object of some kind is coming up, though you haven't even given the verb yet. That takes a lot of processing.

Answered by tchrist on September 2, 2021

First off, "whom do you help" is technically correct because 'who' is the object in that sentence, and 'who' gets inflected to 'whom' when it is the object.

However 'Whom' is an interesting word in the English language. It is a remnant from a time (old English probably) when nouns were inflected. English pronouns are the only system that retains this archaic rule, which is now non-productive, ie all new nouns coined are not inflected based on their role in the sentence.

Like others have said, it would sound pedantic or ironic in casual conversation. Personally I consider it obsolete in all informal conversations, and even most formal conversations. Others disagree and stick to grammar rules assiduously.

Answered by Jamie Clinton on September 2, 2021

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