Is it simply due to the number of people speaking the language, or are there other key factors?
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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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