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A1. To whom were you speaking?

A2. To who were you speaking?

A3. Who were you speaking to?

B1. They asked to whom I was speaking.

B2. They asked to who I was speaking.

B3. They asked who I was speaking to.

A1 and B1 are formal English, but, as we know, one can replace 'whom' with 'who' nowadays.

I'm unsure if this replacement implies the movement of the preposition (to in the above examples) towards the end of the sentence—like in A3 and B3—, or not—like in A2 and B2? If so, is there difference under this aspect between the case in which the sentence is affirmative (B2 and B3) and the case in which the sentence is interrogative (A2 and A3)?

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  • You forgot “They asked whom I was speaking to”, which is perfectly fine — and a lot better than most of those. Rearranging the to to go in front usually comes off as unnaturally stilted. – tchrist Feb 09 '13 at 01:18
  • Yes @tchrist, but when "whom" was considered "standard" English one could not move the preposition: 'to whom' was grammatical, 'whom ... to' was not. However you can even with 'whom' nowadays –  Feb 09 '13 at 01:25
  • People have always used what you might think of as proposition-stranding in English. And I perfectly well assure you that whom is still considered standard in many situations, the most common being immediately after a preposition — even when doing so is wrong. – tchrist Feb 09 '13 at 01:27
  • @tchrist, I will verify this fact. –  Feb 09 '13 at 01:30
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    Unless the copy editor is illiterate, *"to who" won't fly, even these days. Only the ignorant and uneducated would accept that as grammatical: Editors who don't like "to whom" would most likely change A2 to "Who were you speaking to?" That's what I would do -- unless the sentence was part of a dialogue and the point of the sentence was to illustrate the illiteracy of the speaker, which it does subtly enough. –  Feb 09 '13 at 01:40
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    Anyone pompous enough to say To whom were you speaking? wouldn't dream of saying To who were you speaking?. – Barrie England Feb 09 '13 at 08:25
  • @Barrie, since you are an expert connoisseur of the English grammar, I would like to know your own grammatical opinion in reference to the closure of this question as a duplicate of "How can one differentiate between 'who' and 'whom'?" I know you don't use to answer this kind of comments, but, please, do an exception in this case. –  Feb 09 '13 at 08:45
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    @Carlo_R. The first thing I must do is reject your description of me. I’m a dabbler, just like everyone else here. This site, like EL&U, operates on the principle that questions relating to a single topic, even if they concern different aspects of a topic, are best grouped together. I don’t entirely agree with that, because I suspect not many people will want to go over answers written months before. I personally see no harm in reconsidering a question that’s already been asked, even it involves a degree of duplication. But that, I imagine, is not the majority view. – Barrie England Feb 09 '13 at 08:54

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