People

People is a plurality of human beings or other beings possessing enough qualities constituting personhood. It has two usages:

• as the plural of person (in addition to the rarer plural, "persons") or a group of people(grammatically, a suppletive plural and collective noun; e.g. "some people are..."), or otherwise for groups with particular unifying traits, qualities, properties, or characteristics(e.g. the people of Spain, or the people of the Plains).
• as a singular for an indefinite ethnic group or nation (e.g. "a people is...")

Because the word people often refers to abstract and general types of groups, the wordpersons is sometimes used in place of people, especially when it would be ambiguous with its collective sense (e.g. missing persons instead of people). It can collectively refer to allhumans or it can be used to identify a certain ethnic or religious group. For example, "people of color" is a phrase used in North America to describe non-whites.

more info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People