La ville a mille habitants.

French often uses avoir (to have) to express population:

• La ville a mille habitants.
• Literally: The town has one thousand inhabitants.

English usually says has a population of... or simply has 1,000 inhabitants, so this is not as strange as it may seem.

You could also see:

• La ville compte mille habitants. = The town has / counts 1,000 inhabitants.

But La ville est mille habitants is not correct.

A is the third-person singular present form of avoir:

• j’ai = I have
• tu as = you have
• il/elle/on a = he/she/it/one has

Since la ville is singular, the verb must also be singular:

• La ville a... = The town/city has...

Be careful not to confuse:

• a = has
• à = to, at

They sound the same, but they are spelled differently and mean different things.

After numbers in French, you normally put the noun directly, with no article:

• mille habitants = one thousand inhabitants
• deux habitants = two inhabitants
• cent habitants = one hundred inhabitants

So mille habitants is the normal pattern:
number + noun

You would not say un mille habitants in standard French for one thousand inhabitants. French simply uses mille.

No. Mille is invariable, so it never takes s when it means thousand.

• mille habitants
• deux mille habitants
• dix mille habitants

All of these keep mille unchanged.

This is different from million and milliard, which are nouns and do take plural forms:

• un million d’habitants
• deux millions d’habitants

But:

• mille habitants
• deux mille habitants

Because mille refers to more than one person, the noun must be plural:

• un habitant
• deux habitants
• mille habitants

This is the same basic idea as in English: one inhabitant but one thousand inhabitants.

Ville can mean town or city, depending on context. French does not always make the same sharp distinction that English sometimes makes.

So La ville a mille habitants could be translated as:

• The town has 1,000 inhabitants
• The city has 1,000 inhabitants

In real life, for only 1,000 inhabitants, English would often prefer town or even village, but grammatically ville is perfectly possible.

La means the, so it refers to a specific town/city already known from the context.

• La ville a mille habitants. = The town has 1,000 inhabitants.

If you said:

• Une ville a mille habitants.

that would mean A town has 1,000 inhabitants, which sounds much less natural unless you are introducing it for the first time or speaking very generally.

So la usually means the speaker and listener both know which place is being discussed.

A simple pronunciation guide is:

La ville a mille habitants
la veel ah meel ah-bee-tahn

A few useful points:

• ville sounds like veel
• mille sounds like meel
• habitants has a silent final -s
• the h in habitants is silent

In careful speech, you may hear a liaison between mille and habitants:

• mille-z-habitants

That liaison is normal and natural in formal or careful pronunciation.

This is the normal French word order:

subject + verb + number + noun

• La ville = subject
• a = verb
• mille habitants = object/complement

So the sentence is built very straightforwardly.

French can sometimes rearrange things for style or emphasis, but this version is the standard neutral order.

Yes, absolutely.

• La ville a mille habitants.
• Il y a mille habitants dans la ville.

Both are correct, but they focus slightly differently:

• La ville a mille habitants focuses on the town/city as the subject.
• Il y a mille habitants dans la ville focuses on the existence of the inhabitants in that place.

The first version is often more compact and common when giving population figures.

Habitant is correct and common, especially in formal or factual statements about population.

You may also see:

• La ville compte mille habitants.
• La ville a une population de mille habitants.

In everyday speech, people might simply use the number with context, but habitants is very standard when talking about how many people live somewhere.

This is an important grammar point.

With mille, French normally says:

• mille habitants
• deux mille habitants

No de is used.

But with million and milliard, French uses de (or d’ before a vowel):

• un million d’habitants
• deux millions d’habitants

That is because mille behaves like a number adjective, while million behaves more like a noun.

So:

• mille habitants ✔
• un million d’habitants ✔

By itself, La ville a mille habitants usually sounds like a factual statement: the town has 1,000 inhabitants.

But in normal conversation, round numbers can sometimes be understood approximately, depending on context.

If the speaker wants to be clearly approximate, French often adds something like:

• environ mille habitants = about 1,000 inhabitants
• à peu près mille habitants = approximately 1,000 inhabitants

So without those expressions, the sentence normally suggests a stated population figure.