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Are "humans that walk" and "people that sing" incorrect in some versions of English? I am a foreigner who is relatively good at English, but I do not remember s
by krastanov 3y ago
Are "humans that walk" and "people that sing" incorrect in some versions of English? I am a foreigner who is relatively good at English, but I do not remember seeing this prescription in textbooks or style guides.
On the other hand, above I just wrote "I am a foreigner that ..." and Grammarly corrected me to "I am a foreigner who ...". I am still leaving this comment here as a reference to others that wonder the same.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoYes, in all versions of English, actually. But no one will even pick up on it or judge you for it - the rules have grown lax. Nevertheless, in formal, written English, “who” is the overwhelmingly correct choice. Cf https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=people+who%2Cpeople+that&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=people+who%2Cp...
- jameshart 3y agoI don’t think most English speakers have a strong preference for ‘who’ over ‘that’ in these constructs, which means it’s no longer a matter of ‘correctness’. When it no longer even sounds wrong to well educated well-read native speakers, it’s pure prescriptive conservatism to hang on to the idea that there’s a grammatical rule there. I think there’s a stronger instinct to use ‘who’ in preference to ‘which’ in these kinds of constructions - but overall in English both who and which are frequently replaced with ‘that’ in contexts where that previously would have been considered incorrect.