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のは?

kyrajc

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7 Jul 2015
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In the sentence "後ろに 立っている のわ 誰 です か?" (might not be grammatically correct, it's from a multi-lingual language-learning website), I'm really confused about "のは," or "no wa." When do you use のは, and what does it roughly translate to in English?
 
That would be the topic marker は. A technical translation would be: "Concerning the one standing in the back, who is it?", and more naturally: "Who is the one standing in the back?"

Was this sentence from a website claiming to teach Japanese, or from a user's post on that website? In the first case, it might be best to find another learning source - writing は as わ is a pretty egregious error.
 
わ might be just a typo the OP made, since she used は correctly in the title and the rest two in her post.

の is a pronoun to represent "person", which is equivalent to "one" in English, as already mentioned.
 
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