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Yes, 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
by ComputerGuru 3y ago
Yes, 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.