hmpf

(Sorry, it's a "post many short entries day" in Hmpf country.)

As a native speaker of German, a fairly good second-language speaker (or, more precisely, writer ;-)) of English and a sometime dabbler in French, I've always "felt" that English had a lot more words than German, whereas French seemed to have a much smaller vocabulary than either English or German. However, I never had any "official" confirmation of this impression. Today, inspired by the Bill Bryson text, I actually did some research about this, and while I'm aware of the difficulty of trying to estimate the number of words in any given language, the estimates I did find seem to confirm my impression to some degree: according to the German Duden dictionary's website,

- German has between 300,000 and 500,000 words;
- English has between 600,000 and 800,000 words (another website put the number somewhere closer to a million)
- French has a puny 100,000 words.

(I tend to describe the difference between French and English this way: English has ten different words for everything; in French, ten different things have to share one word.)

ETA:

Bill Bryson: http://f2.org/humour/quotes/lang/bill-bryson.html

A German powerpoint presentation about English's tendency to acquire more vocabulary all the time: http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~sprachwiss/sprawineuiso/web-content/downloadfiles/schmid/antrittsvorlesung.pdf - this contains a quote that gives the estimated English vocabulary as approximately 1,000,000 by summer 2006. It also has estimates for the "passive vocabulary" of people of a variety of levels of education:

secretary: 31,500 words
university lecturer: 56,250 words
voracious reader: 63,000 words

Of course, those numbers refer to native speakers.

Another paper I found (http://nti.btk.pte.hu/dogitamas/BHF_FILES/pdf/39Knipf/Kapitel%201-2.pdf) gives the active vocabulary of a native speaker well-used to writing as around 10,000 words, and the average passive vocabulary as 50,000. The average active vocabulary of a person *not* used to writing a lot can be as low as 6,000, though.

So, the passive vocabulary of a reasonably educated person looks to be of a fairly similar size for speakers of the two languages - slightly above 50,000 seems a realistic estimate. And since I have no comparable number for writers of English, and the size of the passive vocabulary seems to be similar, I think it's reasonable to assume that the active vocabulary of a practiced writer would be in a similar range, too - 10,000+?

I wonder where on those scales I am. The situation is complicated somewhat by the weird fact that in English, I seem to have two different kinds of 'active' vocabulary. My speaking vocabulary is very small - based on the numbers given above I wouldn't be surprised to find it in the 6,000 words range; perhaps even less. My active *written* English vocabulary, however, is on par with that of (slightly?) above average native speakers, I'd say. (Notice I said vocabulary, not grammar. I can get very confused by grammar, but I know lots of words. *g*) In German I notice no such extreme difference between the vocabularly available to me when speaking and when writing.

So... 6,000 for speaking English, slightly above 10,000 for writing English, and slightly above 10,000 for writing German, with perhaps a *little* less for speaking - 9,000, maybe? I'm almost certain that my written English vocabularly is larger than my spoken German vocabulary. Which... is a bit bizarre, come to think of it!

As for passive vocabulary... well, I'm a voracious reader in both languages. I've been reading German since around age 8 (that would be 22 years ago now), and English since around age 16 (14 years ago), and been reading predominantly in English since I reached the necessary level of proficiency (at around 20, i.e. ten years ago). I know I don't encounter many words that are completely unknown to me anymore, neither in German nor in English, and I read some authors with fairly large vocabularies. So... 60,000 passive, for both languages? Maybe. Maybe even more?

Not that it matters. I'm just kind of amazed by those numbers. :-)