"People is" or "people are"? Why English counts people, police and news differently from Spanish

Camila, an engineer from Medellín, is on a video call telling a client in Austin what her city is like: "The people is very friendly here." The client understands her, but the sentence has two mistakes, and both come from Spanish.

Spanish gente is a singular collective noun, and English people is the plural of person. So the verb goes in the plural (people are, people think), and when you mean people in general, there's no article: People are very friendly here. Police and clothes work the same way; news works the other way around. With family or team, a singular verb works in every variety of English.

"People is" or "people are"? Always are, and usually no the#

People is plural in its everyday uses. Merriam-Webster marks it that way, with the example people are basically good, and saves the plural peoples for a people: a nation or an ethnic group. The Cambridge Dictionary limits the plural persons to legal contexts. On the street, you say three people.

The clash comes from how each language counts. In Spanish, la gente names a group, and agreement treats it as one thing: la gente está cansada. The Royal Spanish Academy warns that this mismatch between plural meaning and singular grammar "puede dar lugar a errores de concordancia" (can lead to agreement errors). In English, people are many separate individuals, and the verb counts them: people are tired.

The typical Spanish speaker's mistake has two parts. Corpus linguist Elen Le Foll describes it as "the use of the general noun people with a definite article and a verb in the singular form," with the example the people does not have Internet access. In the subtitles she analyzes, la gente is usually plain people; the people is for specific groups (the wrong people).

Here's Camila's sentence, fixed:

Wrong: "The people is very friendly here."
Right: "People are very friendly here."

The police and clothes: singular in Spanish, plural in English#

Police is plural even though it has no -s. The Cambridge Dictionary labels it "noun [plural]," with the example The police are investigating fraud allegations against him. American English agrees.

Javier has just dented his rental car at a gas station in Arizona, and he calls the insurance company:

Wrong: "The police is here and is writing a report."
Right: "The police are here and they're writing a report."

Clothes is the second noun that flips from singular to plural. Spanish treats la ropa as a singular whole (la ropa está sucia); in English, clothes is a plural with no singular, according to the Cambridge grammar: my clothes are dirty.

The reverse: las noticias becomes the news is#

News is always singular even though it ends in -s. The Cambridge grammar lists it among nouns used only in the singular: the news is good. It belongs to the same family as advice, which we cover in our article on advices and furnitures.

The trap runs in both directions. In the Instituto Cervantes learner corpus, English speakers studying Spanish got gente wrong in 47 of 237 uses, or 20%, and 69% of those errors involved verb agreement. Each language pulls toward its own number.

Family, team, government: singular or plural?#

With group words, the singular is the safe choice on both sides of the Atlantic. In an experiment by Kathryn Bock and her colleagues, British speakers put a plural verb after a collective noun 20% of the time, compared with 2% for Americans. Their summary: "Together, the British were about ten times more likely than the Americans to use plurals with collectives (.20 to .02)." Ten times more, but only one time in five.

Newspaper writing shows the same gap. In the financial newspapers the same team sampled, plural verbs appeared in 26% of British cases and 7% of American ones. Magnus Levin found the singular ahead even in British print. His dissertation concludes that in written British English, "the plural was more common than the singular … only in the case of personal pronouns."

They after a collective noun is normal in both varieties. In those newspapers, plural pronouns for a group appeared in 42% of British cases and 38% of American ones. My family is from Cádiz, and they love the beach works in both countries.

What changes between varieties is the tolerance for a plural verb. Nigel Caplan sums it up with corpus data: "plural verbs are more common in British, Irish, and New Zealand English than other varieties." The Cambridge grammar gives the logic: singular when you see the group as one unit, plural when you see its members. Caplan adds that British teams named after a city take a plural verb: Leeds United are winning.

With quantity expressions, the noun after of rules. Yolanda Fernández-Pena studied 23 quantifying collectives, such as group and majority, in the BNC and COCA corpora. Used bare (a group is), they take a singular verb in 72.23% of British cases and 81.31% of American ones. Add a plural of-phrase (a group of parents) and the plural verb wins 67.72% and 64.10% of the time. That's why you say a lot of people are and the majority of my colleagues are.

The practical rule: with family, team or government, use a singular verb, then they: My team is small, but they work fast. With people, police and clothes, always plural. With news, always singular.

Could you say People are friendly, but the news is bad out loud right now, without a stray the or is slipping in? At speed, knowing the rule isn't enough. Tabla trains that moment: you see the sentence in Spanish, say it in English before the timer runs out, and speech recognition scores every attempt.

A friend from Chicago asks you about Madrid. You want to say: "La gente cena tarde, la ropa de invierno es carísima y las noticias de la noche son a las nueve." How do you say it in English?

"People eat dinner late, winter clothes are really expensive, and the evening news is on at nine." People takes no the because you mean people in general, and it takes a plural verb. Clothes gets are; news gets is.

The next time you're about to say the people is, drop the the and swap is for are.

Try this today: record yourself saying People are friendly here, The police are on their way and The news is good three times, then listen for any stray the people or police is.