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Which of these can we say?

  1. London's people are happy.
  2. The people of London are happy.
  3. People are happy in London.
  4. People in London are happy.
Nayuki
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Mahdi
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3 Answers3

15

All are correct but they don't all mean the same thing.

Numbers 1 and 2 mean that the people who live in London are happy.

Number 3 suggests that people (who may live elsewhere) are happy when they are in London.

Number 4 is ambiguous. It is not clear whether it refers to the entire population, some of the population or visitors to London.

Ronald Sole
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    However, it seems to me that London's people is a good deal less common than the people of London. – Colin Fine Feb 25 '18 at 23:24
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    An answer that merely says "Yes you can say that" without attempting to clarify the reasons why, or the circumstances in which that is true, is a bad ELL answer, and we often just delete those if they really give no explanation at all. Certainly just affirming or denying the grammaticality of a single expression is about the least helpful thing we can possibly do here. – Nathan Tuggy Feb 26 '18 at 08:25
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    An alternative to 1 and 2 would be: Londoners are happy. – Steve Melnikoff Feb 26 '18 at 09:49
  • #3 can be interpreted either way. – Lightness Races in Orbit Feb 26 '18 at 15:18
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In general English allows for abstract possessives like this. Like your example, a city or a country can be talked about as possessing their populations so London's people and Britain's people make sense. You could also say a ship's crew or a house's residents.

Nathan Tuggy
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Doarn
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2

While all your suggestions are grammatically sound and would be interpreted as @Ronald Sole suggests, generally when talking about a location's residents, you often use a derivative of the location name. This is known as a demonym. In your case the sentence would most succinctly be written:

Londoners are happy

I say derivative as while the word often simply involves adding an 'n' to the location for countries (American, Russian, Costa Rican), or 'er' to a town or city (the afore-mentioned Londoner, New Yorker, Berliner), it can get a bit more complex: Germans lose a 'y' from Germany, for a Mexican the 'o' changes to 'an', Canada also adds an 'i' before the 'a' for Canadian.

Sometimes the demonym is just wierd: Norwegian for Norway people is comprehensible, but Glaswegian for Glasgow? A Liverpudlian (because puddles are little pools?) comes from Liverpool, someone from Newcastle is Novacastrian and a resident of Culiacán is, apparently a Cliché.

Wikipedia has a sizeable list of city demonyms.

mcalex
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