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