A CORRESPONDENT writes:

My 4 year old corrected my wife today. My wife used "whom" in a sentence (properly, mind you) and my daughter said "mama, sometimes you say a weird word, 'whom', when what you should be saying is 'who'. 'Whom' is not a real word." Language change in action?

Amazing, this. First, we see how grammatically aware kids are here. Second, we see evidence that girls are usually faster to learn language than boys; this is a very clever point from a four-year-old. Finally, we may be seeing something about the future of whom here, which we'll return to in a moment.

As it happens, my own 11-year-old son asked me this morning, of his new baby brother, "Can we teach him to talk really early, like at two? I want him to be able to hang out and play, because we only have a few years before I go off to college." Heart-meltingly cute. But I explained to him that we can't really teach the baby to talk early; babies go through predictable language development pretty much at their own pace. The baby is now cooing and gurgling, and making a few basic consonant sounds. By one or so he'll be babbling and maybe using a couple of words proper. By two he'll be stringing words together. By three we'll see pretty complete sentences, and by four we'll have a real talker on our hands. But at two, he's not going to be much for conversation.

The astonishing growth between two and four in a child's language development is the kind of evidence that convinced people like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker that babies have, a "language organ" (Chomsky) or a "language instinct" (Pinker). Prof Chomsky argued from "the poverty of the stimulus": babies get little instruction, and the talking they hear around them is a fragmented mess. That they learn grammar at all is a minor miracle that Prof Chomsky attributes to an innate ability. Other researchers have argued that children's language stimulus isn't so poor as Prof Chomsky argued. And plenty of linguists and psychologists dispute the innateness hypothesis entirely. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: children's language abilities develop at an astonishing pace between two and four, and it seems that they largely teach themselves.

As I told my son this morning, kids make cute errors like I goed because they seek regularity. They've learned that the past tense of English verbs usually involves a -d or -t sound at the end of a word (played, slept). No surprise that they overgeneralise to goed, speaked and the like. They are literally making up the rules as they go along.



What has my friend's four-year-old learned? There's a pronoun who. It's a question word that can start sentences like "Who is that?" Adults also use it all the time in questions like "Who'd you invite over?" and "Who are you talking about?" It also can kick off a relative clause: "She's the colleague who sits next to me," and "She's the colleague who I've started to become friends with." In other words, the girl has heard revered, trusted adults (parents, teachers) using who as a subject, a direct object and an object of a preposition. Rule: who is used in all these roles.

And then comes this occasional weird variant. Every once in a while, mummy or daddy, for no obvious reason, uses whom in the exact same place they usually use who. Grown-ups are silly. They don't let me cut my own hair, they insist on eating disgusting green plants, and they occasionally misspeak. Mommy, it's who, not whom.

The thing is, the girl's rule is right: who is used in all these roles. Geoffrey Pullum makes a distinction between Normal and Formal language, and most English-speakers today, when in Normal mode, steer clear of whom. We leave out the relative pronoun (That's the friend I'm inviting to dinner) or just use who. Children are rarely exposed to Formal, and have little concept of register. Whom is just weird for them. A search of the Spoken category of the Corpus of Contemporary American English finds that I is about eight times more common than me—but who is 57 times more common than whom. It appears just 53 times out of every million words. That number would be even lower in the language used around a four-year-old. No wonder she might process it as a mere glitch in Mommy's English.

My friend asked "language change in action?" Yes, probably, but his daughter is reflecting, not driving the change here. (Kids do drive all kinds of other changes, especially when they become teenagers and play with language self-consciously.) Here, she's just seeing that hardly anyone uses whom. Our societies increasingly prize spontaneity, authenticity and "just talking" over polish and elaborate formality. In other words, Normal.

Since whom is becoming less common, many people can't use it properly even when they are aiming for Formal. (A common mistake is using it in a subject role, for example: That's the candidate whom I hope will win the election. Here, the mistake is in thinking that I hope turns who into an object. But the clause is really who will win the election, with I hope just an interpolation.) The unease over whom just makes people avoid it more.

I think whom has a long life left in it, though, for non-grammatical reasons. Educated people prize language, and the mastery of Formal. Their status at the top of the social heap is an incentive to treat the proper use of whom as a sign of intelligence, not just the Formal register. They do most of the edited and published writing we consume. And so whom will live in print for a good long time, even as many of those same people ignore it when they're chatting at the proverbial water cooler.

Kids will go on reaching secondary school being taught, for the first time, how to use who's strange cousin. They will also be learning a meta-linguistic lesson: sometimes you don't use the language that comes most naturally to you. And finally, when they have kids, they'll start explaining the whole strange story to them in turn.

