Vocabulary sizes differ enormously between large and small-scale societies.

Evidence

Many of the languages carefully documented by linguists and anthropologists working in small-scale societies contain between 3,000 to 5,000 words—that’s the entire dictionary. Meanwhile, slim dictionaries for European languages often contain about 50,000 words. A solid college-level English dictionary contains about 100,000 words, and the full-size Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 300,000 entries. Of course, this is totally unfair since the dictionaries of nonliterate societies reside entirely in the heads of speakers (until an anthropologist arrives), but European dictionaries reside in books and online databases, and few or no actual speakers know all the words. However, the average American 17-year-old knows 40–60,000 words while their professors know about 73,000 words. These estimated in-the-head vocabularies contain 8 to 14 times more words than are available to the speakers of many small-scale languages, assuming they know all the words in their languages. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 775

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Languages differ widely in vowel category counts, from two to over ten. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 575

Broader Connections

• Languages differ widely in vowel category counts, from two to over ten. #expands (0.72) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 575