1. Introduction From the morphological point of view, one of the main characteristics reflecting the English language’s change in contrast to its Indo-European origin is the loss of case marking. Of originally seven cases, that used to exist in Proto-Indo-European, English has preserved only three cases that are marked on the surface level. Besides the nominative and the genitive cases, present-day English has retained only the objective case, which, however, is heavily limited to being distinctively marked only in a few pronouns. Among which only the interrogative/relative pronoun who with its genitive form whose and its objective form whom, respectively, is not a personal pronoun. However, looking at the linguistic reality we can observe that many speakers of English constantly use the unmarked nominative form who in place of the form whom, i.e. in objective position or as prepositional complement. Overall, whom seems to have survived only in formal texts, as most contemporary descriptive grammarians attest (e. g. cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 367). This circumstances have lead to Sapir’s conclusion that, in the its development from a synthetic to an analytic language, depending increasingly on word order and other constraints rather than on inflectional case marking in order to convey grammatical relations, English will eventually lose further of its case marking. Thus, he hinted to this loss almost a century ago by stating that “[i]t is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred years from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying ‘Whom did you see?’” (1970: 156). On the contrary, it has often been declared, that whom has survived and will persist, even if merely due to the influence of prescriptive grammarians who have propagated its usage among educated speakers (cf. Aarts 1994: 74, Walsh/Walsh 1989: 284). Nevertheless, this prescriptive influence has contributed to a “relatively unstable situation” (Schneider 1992a: 231) whereas especially the paradigm of English relative pronouns (rather than that of the interrogatives) is not clearly set – with the additional existence of the two alternative relativizers that and the zero morpheme for restricted relative clauses complicating matters even further. Generally, there is some insecurity among speakers of English on the selection of who(m), occasionally even resulting in hypercorrections (cf. Aarts 1994: 71). A similar case is occurring in the usage of the related genitive form whose: It can used to refer to both animate and inanimate antecedents. For the latter incident, however, exists in present-day English also the variant form of which. Thus, here again it seems that the inflected variant is ousted by an uninflected form. Again, one may ask whether this is a sign for the loss of case marking in the English language or solely a preconceived notion lacking corpus evidence. The paper will first deal with the present-day state of the respective forms’ usage and then encounter a diachronic approach in order to compare their development to Sapir’s drift hypothesis. 2. Linguists’ View on the Usage of "Who" and "Whom" As it has already been implied, grammarians of different backgrounds have diverse opinions on the matter of when to use who or whom in the competing contexts, i. e. when the pronoun with a personal reference is functioning as an object or a prepositional complement within the interrogative or relative clause. For representatives of prescriptivism (e. g. Robert Lowth, Lindley Murray, and William Cobett) the issue seems to be quite clear: who is to be used as subject only, while whom is obligatory when the relative pronoun is direct object or a prepositional complement, both in pied piped constructions and in clauses with a stranded preposition (cf. Aarts 1994: 72-73). Hence, they cope with the who paradigm in a way similar to that of personal pronouns, where syntactical function determines the form. In opposition to that, contemporary grammarians take linguistic reality into account as well, namely, that uninflected who is constantly employed in object territory by the majority of speakers. In consequence, already Kenyon (1930) stresses that who may well bear an objective case, for it lies “in the ordinary acceptance of our use of the concept of case in present English. We do not insist on different form for distinguishing nominative from objective in nouns” (1930: 254). He further states that “the only remaining argument against the colloquial use of interrogative who as objective is on grounds of taste and personal preference” (1930: 255). More recent grammarians try to explain this dispersing state by hinting at stylistic constraints, too. For instance Quirk et al. point out that “[w]hom is largely restricted to formal style, and can be avoided altogether in informal style” (1985: 367), whereas however, we may not forget that many English speakers opt for the uninflected who in both styl