Following up on my informal research on majority and minority: the other day, a friend of mine uttered the following sentence:
There's a small minority within this group that are primarily Spanish speakers.
Note that are cannot be replaced with is here, unless it's changed to something like There's a small minority within this group that is primarily Spanish-speaking. Most instructive to those who insist that a minority must be singular no matter what, of course you couldn't say There's a small minority within this group that is primarily a Spanish speaker.
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Note: Please don't comment on what you learned in school, and don't insult other commenters for freely expressing their English-speaking intuitions. This is Language Log, not Richard Lederer.
Posted by Eric Bakovic at August 19, 2006 12:18 PM