By Anatoly Liberman
Question: How large is an average fluent speaker’s vocabulary?
Answer: I have often heard this question, including its variant: “Is it true that English contains more words than any other (European) language?” The problem is that “an average fluent speaker” does not exist. Also, it is important to distinguish between how many words we recognize (our so-called passive vocabulary) and how many we use in everyday communication (active vocabulary). The size of people’s active vocabulary depends on their needs, but it is rarely large. Thus, five-year olds can say everything they want, but if they are read to and if grownups speak to them all the time, they understand complicated tales and the content of their parents’ conversation amazingly well (oftentimes much better than one could wish for). Some people cultivate their conversational skills and make an effort to use “sophisticated” words in their dealings with the outside world; others are happy to remain at the level of first-graders. One of the most memorable events in my teaching career happened about thirty years ago when a student approached me after a lecture and, having complimented me (they always do in such cases), added: “But I don’t understand half of the words you use.” Ever since that day I have worked systematically on reducing my “public” vocabulary but sometimes still forget myself.
Our passive vocabulary depends on our reading habits. Since “great classics” are being frowned upon as elitist, the younger generation has trouble understanding even 19th-century English (Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and so on, through Henry James and the utterly forgotten Galsworthy), while publishers promote books written more or less in Basic English. Students get tired of following those authors’ synonyms, idioms, and convoluted syntax (their greatest compliments are matter of fact and down to earth, while all digressions are castigated as rambling). The same is true, to an even greater extent, of their attempts to read Defoe, Fielding, and Swift. For some Americans of college age even the vocabulary of Mark Twain poses difficulties. It is hard to believe that Mark Twain, like Jack London and Charles Dickens, was self-taught. Yet quite a few of our best and brilliantly educated writers did not make use of an extensive vocabulary. Oscar Wilde is a typical example. Others, like Dickens and Meredith, let alone James Joyce, made a heroic effort to use as many rare and learned words as possible.
Good dictionaries of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, etc. seem to be equally thick. In a dictionary containing about 60,000 words one can find practically everything one needs. Webster’s Unabridged features seven or eight times more. Obviously, none of us needs to know so much. But perhaps two features distinguish English from its neighbors: an overabundance of synonyms (because of the partly unhealthy influx of Romance words) and the ubiquity of slang. French also overflows with argot, but English dictionaries of slang (British, American, Canadian, Australian) are almost unbelievably thick. This makes it harder to master current English than, for example, German, but each language has its difficulties. English resorts to all the usual international words (music, radio, antibiotic, and the like), while Icelandic prefers native coinages for such concepts. It appears that whether you want to learn a foreign language or your own you have to make a sustained effort. But then this is what the sweat of one’s brow is for. Only Adam had an easy life: none of the objects around him had a name, and he was instructed to call them something (presumably he remembered his own neologisms). His offspring ca