Is it simply due to the number of people speaking the language, or are there other key factors?
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Culture and Environment: The environment and culture in which a language develops can greatly influence its vocabulary. For example, Inuit languages have many words for different types of snow because those distinctions are important in their environment. Similarly, a culture with a strong tradition of poetry and literature might develop a rich vocabulary to express subtle emotional and aesthetic experiences.
Historical Influence: Languages often borrow words from other languages. For instance, English has a particularly large vocabulary because it has borrowed heavily from Latin, Greek, French, and many other languages over centuries of cultural exchange and conquest.
Language Structure: Some languages are structured in a way that allows for the easy creation of new words. For example, in German, you can combine existing words to create new ones, which can technically inflate the size of its vocabulary.
Usage: Languages used in many different areas (like science, technology, literature, daily conversation, etc.) may tend to have larger vocabularies because they need words to cover all these topics.
Counting Method: Finally, the way we count words can greatly influence the size of a language’s vocabulary. Do we count inflected forms (like ‘run’, ‘runs’, ‘running’) as separate words? What about compound words? Different languages handle these issues differently.
I hope this helps 🙂
Well, a complicating factor here is **_we don’t really know exactly how many words are in every language._**
Linguistic scholars do their best to make sense of that information, but you can’t really count every word in a given language. Dictionaries are useful, sure, but they’re not without their biases — someone is choosing which words to include, or not include. Spellcheckers are also useful, but they are biased to include a lot of variants of words, regardless of usage.
What do you count as a “word”? Do you count roots? Conjugations? Compound words?
Language is always evolving. At what point do we consider a certain word to be part of a language? At what point do we consider a word to _not_ be part of a language any more? These are all huge debates in the world of language scholarship.
But okay, setting that aside, we do know that some languages _probably_ have more words than others. A lot of it comes down to the fact that **grammatical structure — and especially conjugation rules — impact how many words are in a language.**
For example, think about Spanish vs. English. In Spanish, you have a unique conjugation (a separate word) for the English equivalent of “she runs,” “he runs,” “we run,” “they run,” “you run,” “[formal you] run,” and so on and so forth. You have ~6 versions of “to run” depending on the conjugation. In English, you just have “run” and “runs” and standardized pronouns.
Different languages handle compound words and complex phrases/concepts differently. German words, for example, are famously _extremely long._ But there are rules, and logic, and connecting threads — in some ways, akin to how other languages use compound words or short phrases.
**It also has to do with how long a language has been around, how many different groups of people use it, etc.** English has a large lexicon because it is so broadly spoken internationally. You have many geographic variants of one language, and many speakers, including those in highly specialized fields who need their own unique words for things.
Necessity?
Presume language exists primarily to communicate ideas between beings. The “words” needed to communicate need to be understood by the other, so you’re sort of both creating a shared reality and/or describing a shared reality with them.
The amount of “words” needed will, hypothetically, be connected to the degree of specificity required to continue addressing all phenomena, both from the internal conscious and the external world.
Take the old trope of ” Eskimos having 20 words for ‘ snow'”…if you’re around a lot of frozen water, chances are you’ll start finding need to “dial in” words for certain types of frozen water in ways beyond “snow” or “ice”… maybe there’s ice in the morning that looks a certain way and interferes with travel – at some point you and your buddy will make up a new sound for that so you no longer need to explain in a few sentences what you mean.
Hard to ELI5 this, it’s a pretty deep philosophy of language ps. I just made up what I wrote. No claims being made here. Don’t send the semantics police my way.
Edit: your point about “more speakers = more words” sounds legit if you want to start throwing probabilistic models of the likelihood of new concepts being created as a function of ” total communications”, and that would be directly correlated to number of speakers.
Edit again: go down the rabbit hole of “linguistic relativity” and things like Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for more fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity?wprov=sfla1
There’s also another angle too look at it at: Synthetic vs Analytic languages. It’s short it’s a way in which languages work with already existing words to create new ones. Synthetic languages change(in whatever way) any given word, analytic languages change thing around a word.
It’s clearer with an example, I’ll show it comparing English and German.
(English is borderline a mix between the two, but strictly speaking it’s an analytic language so I’m gonna treat it as one. German tho is literally a book example of a synthetic language)
So, I present to you “a sleeping bag”. The word “sleeping” exists on its own. The word “bag” exists on its own. If I say “bag” without any context the image that comes to mind isn’t a “sleeping bag”, they do not look the same; if I say “sleeping” you’re most likely to think I’m just saying a verb in its Continuous form. When we say “sleeping bad” we mean those two words together, the are inseparable now. We haven’t changed them in any way and yet we’ve created a new Term™. Number of terms of English went up, number of words stayed the same.
In German tho it’s a completely different story. We take the verb “schlaf”(- sleep) and a noun “(der) Sack”(- a bag) and we combine them to make “(der) Schlafsack”(a sleeping bag). We didn’t have this word before, we have created a new one. In this case /both/ the number of terms and a number of words went up.
So, strictly speaking the number of words doesn’t actually depend on geography/development/number of people speaking it. Numbers of roots and/or terms is completely another story tho
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