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In English “who” is used as a subject:

Who is eating?

“Whom” is used as an object:

The person whom I saw.

In Spanish is there any sort of a distinction like this, or is “quien” both for subjects and objects?

Stormblessed
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2 Answers2

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No, there isn't. Interrogative words in Spanish don't retain any renmants of case distinction (unless you count cúyo, which I suppose we could call the genetive of quién).

In your two sentences, you'd get ¿Quién está comiendo? and La persona a quien vi.

Note, however, that Spanish greatly prefers using que in relative clauses, so while la persona a quien vi is fine, you will rarely hear it in most dialects, with la persona que vi being the preferred construction.

user0721090601
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  • Is it a typo that there's an accent in the first "quien" but not the second? – Stormblessed Jul 19 '19 at 23:41
  • @Stormblessed no. In the first one, quién is used as a question word with takes an accent because it is stressed. In the second, it is used as a relative pronoun; they don't take accents because they are unstressed. – user0721090601 Jul 19 '19 at 23:43
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    @guifa Shouldn't that be la persona a quien* vi comiendo, with "personal a*"? It sounds very strange to me without it. – pablodf76 Jul 20 '19 at 01:48
  • @pablodf76 ack, yes. I had originaly written que (which is what made me write the latter sentence) but I accidentally only replaced the quien. Fixed. – user0721090601 Jul 20 '19 at 11:18
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    Another idiomatic way of using the equivalent of "whom" in Spanish consists of saying la persona a la que* vi comiendo* – Gustavson Jul 20 '19 at 14:20
  • genitive, not genetive – Lambie Jul 21 '19 at 14:04
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My intuitive way of thinking about this is yes, because the who compartment in my brain has quien in it, and the whom compartment has a quien in it. And I think that when an English speaker learns Spanish and gets the hang of saying a quien when it is needed, that person has an easier time knowing when one could use whom in English, and more importantly, when not to use whom. (For those who aren't aware -- most native English speakers never use whom at all. I used to think it was ignorance only that led to people not using whom. But at ELU, there's a strong anti-whom camp, which includes some of the top, most knowledgeable participants.)

Examples:

¿Quién está llamando a estas horas?

¿A quién le importa lo que yo diga?

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aparente001
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