student asking question

Is it okay to say "peoples" even though the word "people" already refer to the multiple numbers of person?

teacher

Native speaker’s answer

Rebecca

When we talk about a group of individuals, "people" is used to express the plural form. The only time "peoples" is used is when we want to differentiate between people of different ethnic backgrounds, tribes, or clans. In this video, we can see that it is a meeting of groups from different planets (who clearly are not the same species), so "peoples" has been used here. Ex: There were many nomadic peoples who once lived in Eurasia. Ex: Before colonization, many indigenous peoples lived in relative peace in the Americas.

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