The amount of people who surrounded him was little.
vs
The amount of people who surrounded him was few.
Are they both grammatically correct? In the first one, the "little" is talking about the amount of people, and not people itself, in which "few" would be used.
Also, which one would generally be used in normal situations?
Best Answer
People are countable. Therefore, talking about a generalized "amount" of people is not a great idea. Your sentence would be better formed as "The number of people who surrounded him was small." This in turn suggests that you could replace "the number of people who surrounded him" with "the crowd surrounding him".