‘The youth deserve the best’ or ‘The youths deserve the best’?

A colleague inspired this question a few days ago. He is someone with whom I regularly discuss headline/grammar matters. We had looked at the difference between ‘the Yoruba’ and ‘t to establish which is correct between ‘The Yoruba are a large ethnic group’ and ‘The Yorubas are a large ethnic group’.

Well, my perspective was/is that the answer depends on context. ‘The Yoruba’ is used as a collective noun phrase, representing all Yoruba people. Hence, we say ‘The Yoruba are a large ethnic group’. The same thing applies to the Igbo, the Fulani, the Hausa, the Efik, etc. We do not need to pluralise the head words (Yoruba, Fulani, etc.) in this context, as the structure is comparable to adjectival collective phrases like the rich, the poor, and the underprivileged:

The rich also cry.

The poor deserve attention.

The Yoruba love their language.

To pluralise ‘Yoruba’ in the context, it is better to leave out the article ‘the’, to become ‘Yorubas are a large ethnic group.’ So, as my friend and I agreed, the following are the standard expressions:

The Yoruba are a large ethnic group.

Yorubas are a large ethnic group.

The Igbo are a large ethnic group.

Igbos are a large ethnic group.

The Fulani are a large ethnic group.

Fulanis are a large ethnic group.

Yet, this question is also important: is it always wrong to say ‘the Yorubas’? No. When referring to a specific number of Yoruba people, once they are more than one person, they can legitimately be called the Yorubas. Note, however, that the term is no longer referring to all Yoruba people:

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There were twenty people at the event. Ten of them were Yorubas; five were Igbos while others were Kanuris. I learnt that the Yorubas were the first to leave, followed by the Kanuris and later the Igbos.

Between the youth and youths

I have deliberately spent time on the ‘intro’ to make the job of answering the topic question simple. Of course, by now you must have sharpened your insight concerning the poser about who deserves the best: the youth or the youths? When referring to all young people in a community, country, or globally, the standard phrase is ‘the youth’:

The youth deserve the best.

The Nigerian youth feel marginalised.

The African youth are dreaming big.

On the other hand, ‘youths’ can be used without ‘the’ to mean the plural form of the countable individual youth:

The youth deserve the best. (Correct)

Youths deserve the best. (Correct)

For ‘The youths’ to be correct, we should be referring to a specific number:

When the youths gained entrance into the house, they started singing angrily.

This indicates that we have a specific number of young people in mind. This could be two, five, ten, 100, etc., depending on how many the house could possibly accommodate. But definitely not all the youth in the country. Meanwhile, you can check out our earlier discussion of the collective noun concept in the May 9, 2017 edition of THE PUNCH, titled ‘How grammar treats the rich and the poor’. .