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Can I say "it's people"? Is there a situation where this phrase can be used in a daily speech and grammatically correct?
Usage example:
A: Why don't you understand?
B: Me? It's people who can't understand me!
I confuse whether I should use "it's" or "these are", but I think the second one would sound awkward?
As always, it would help to look at the uncontracted form:
It is people who cannot understand me!
"It" is a dummy pronoun, as "people who can't understand me" (*) would be ungrammatical with the "who".
Alternative ways of phrasing this idea are:
or just:
This sentence sounds very natural when used in the right context because the subject, other people or people in general, is placed at the very front of the sentence. You could say that this is an example of the topic-comment structure used in English.
From the above, it follows that "these are the people who don't understand me" has an entirely different meaning.
"It's people..." is correct as written. There is a widely known joke using this form:
"I love humanity. It's people I can't stand."
But to say, for example, "It's astonishing how early the sun rises in summer," is quite common.
That sentence is a cleft sentence. Specifically, it's a type of cleft sentence called an "it-cleft sentence," and an it-cleft sentence always starts with the word "it," regardless of whether the following word is a singular noun, a plural noun, or even something that isn't a noun at all.
Some other examples of it-cleft sentences:
