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“It is they who lied” or “it is them who lied?”
What rules make “Remember me, who am your friend” grammatical?

Which one of these is correct?

It is I who am at fault.

It is me who is at fault.

The word "is" is a conjugation of "be" which is a linking verb.

I also want to know the same for 2nd person.

It is you who are at fault.

It is you who is at fault.

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    Your question presupposes there must exist one and only one right answer. It does not admit the possibility that there are no right answers at all, or that there are two. That’s going to be a problem with this one.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 25, 2012 at 3:10
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    Possible duplicate of “It is they who lied” or “it is them who lied?”
    – Fuhrmanator
    Commented May 25, 2012 at 4:08
  • Related questions also found here, here, here, here, here, and here
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 25, 2012 at 6:44
  • This is slightly different than the above as the "me" or "I" is center in the phrase, it acts both as a subject and an object.
    – Adam Grant
    Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 17:03

1 Answer 1

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Research associated with the ‘Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ shows that when the first person pronoun is final, me is more common than I ‘(It’s me’), but that when there’s a following relative clause, the opposite is true (‘It’s I who . . .’). That would suggest that It is I who am at fault is preferred over It is me who is at fault, assuming we reject the hybrid It is I who is at fault. Applying the same logic to the second person pronoun, we may suppose that It is you who are at fault is more popular than It is you who is at fault.

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    An ngram for “it is you who is/are” suggests a strong preference for the “It is you who are” version over the “It is you who is” version. If there is no agreement, wouldn’t “It’s us who is” be what people would use? But they don’t: it is “us who are” because there are several of us. “...you who is” sounds as funny as “...us who is”.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 25, 2012 at 6:55
  • Well, there is agreement, but it’s notional or proximity agreement rather than formal agreement. In the first person plural I imagine ‘It is we who are at fault’ would be more frequently found than ‘It is us who are at fault.’
    – Barrie England
    Commented May 25, 2012 at 7:08
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    Yes, it is: much much more frequent.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 25, 2012 at 7:09
  • @tchrist: "it is you who is" works (kinda) because you is singular. So some people use it In "it is us who is", us disagrees with is in actual plurality as well as grammatical conjugation, so nobody uses it.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 12:34

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