Why do different languages have different sized lexicon/vocabularies?

Question

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

In: 0

Answer 1

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.