As someone who teaches pre-service teachers about English grammar I try to be very
careful about making claims about the nature of language change.  The following is
one of those claims which is  too sweeping:


>  Since [standard written]
> English changes, children often have to be taught things that the
> conservative school grammar wants to retain, but which has been lost in
> their home version of English (such as the 'who/whom' distinction,
> rapidly disappearing even from middle-class English).

The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Biber et al. (1999) uses a large
collection of written and spoken texts to describe the distribution of  grammatical
constructions in spoken and written English.  On page 214, Biber et al. observe
that the use of whom to ask questions is essentially non-existent in their corpus.
So, the statement above is correct for questions like 1.

1.  Who do you trust?

However,  Biber et al. note:

In the written registers [their broad categories are fiction, news, and academic
writing], interrogative whom is consistently used when it is the complement of a
preceding preposition.

    For whom would I be working?      (p. 214)

I can find no frequency data which defines "consistently."

They observe that if the preposition is not moved, who will be used.

    Amanda, who are you going out with?  (example on p. 215)

I can not find any discussion in Biber et al. concerning the following
constructions:

2.  Outside my office this morning were 20 students, several of whom were not able
to enroll in one of my classes.
3.  I tried to accommodate those students for whom the class was a requirement.

I suspect that for almost all dialects of English whom is obligatory in 2 and 3.
If that is the case, then I don't think it is accurate to say the who/whom
distinction is "rapidly disappearing even in middle class English."

If there is a dialect of American English which has ONLY who, I would like to know
about it.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University.

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