Who/m

From Fowler's Modern English Usage: Who is used as a relative pronoun (The Woman who saw you) and as an interrogative (who is there?), and whom is, formally, its objective form (The woman whom you say / Whom did you see?). In all these uses who (or whom) refers to a person or to several people, but as a relative pronoun who can informally refer to an animal or to an organization regarded in terms of its members (The committee, who meet on Friday,...) 

It is no surprise to see that whom is on the decline. Even though it is still a prescriptive rule, many of us don't use it anymore. For this particular project I took a look at some common sentences where who and whom are commonly misused.  

[do] [p*] [v*]

Whom Globwe Coha

Who Globwe Coha

This first graph shows the increase of who versus whom in the past 200 years. Other than a few random dips, the usage of who over time has increased. The graph below shows the words in relation to each other.You can see again that there has been a drop in the use of whom and a huge increase in the use of who.

Looking at Globwe, you can see that Sri Lanka has the highest hits per million in usage of 'whom'. This is because their usage of English is trying to be more of a 'correct' usage, while those who have English as a native language we are more adept to changing our language.

[have] [p*] [v*]

Whom Globwe Coha

Who Globwe Coha

This graph shows similarities to the use with 'do' with a constant increase of the use of who in relation to whom. Once who rises close to 100% usage, it has a steady life moving back and forth between 82%-98% usage. It is interesting to note that once whom because almost completely died out, it has some of the lowest percentage of usage between the three uses of whom we looked at.

[be] [p*] [v*]

Whom Globwe Coha BNC vs COCA

Who Globwe Coha BNC vs COCA

Finally the words with 'be' also show an increase of who in relation to whom. Who has had a harder and slower climb to the top, but the bottom graph shows the least amount of uses of whom among the three uses.

One would assume that the British would use whom more so than American English because of the poshness and prestige that it sounds like, however looking at this graph between BNC and COCA usage of who and whom (I was unable to get the corpora to work with the side by side comparisons, which is why there aren't any links to any of the other searches) you can see that the British Corpus has even less hits for whom than COCA.

Overall these findings didn't offer anything new than what we already knew. Whom has been on the downword spiral for quite a while, being replaced completely by who. There is no reviving it back to life, as much as some prescriptivists try to keep it up.