I’ve never heard anyone say “on people” instead of “about people”? Is it an Albany expression?
Probably made by a non-native English speaker. Prepositions are so unique to each language and oftentimes seemingly randomly chosen (is that à, de, sur, or no preposition at all, French?). If you roughly know a one-to-one translation of the prepositions from your language into English, you can often get it wrong just like this.
En France, Au Canada, À New-York, Aux Seychelles, À Cuba.
Don’t try to find a logic, there literally is none and anyone who tells you otherwise is just retrofitting rules to chaotic data and will inevitably have a list of exceptions longer than a French politician’s criminal record. Half of it is literally just “what was grammatically fashionable at the time this toponym was discovered/imported/created”.
This does not excuse English’s abuse of prepositions though. Why do I get on the bus but in the car? Why, English?
I once heard a non-native English speaker tell me they remember “on” vs. “in” as “if you can walk around while on it (train, plane, bus) then it’s on, if you can’t (car) then it’s in.”
I kind of liked that description.
