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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.
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    In some cases, you won't need the 's. You can say, "London residents" and things like that.
    – Mr Lister
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 8:05

3 Answers 3

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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.

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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
    Commented Feb 25, 2018 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
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 8:25
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    An alternative to 1 and 2 would be: Londoners are happy.
    – Steve Melnikoff
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 9:49
  • #3 can be interpreted either way.
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 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.

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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.

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  • For the record, nobody calls a Geordie a Novacastrian.
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 15:18
  • While true upon Tyne, there are other (new?) Newcastles outside of the north of England where nobody is called Geordie
    – mcalex
    Commented Feb 27, 2018 at 4:04

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