In English. Therefore, in the United States, dictionaries are kept at workplaces, which I have never seen in Russia.
Here are the facts:
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How many words are in the English language?
- About a million, or more.

It is hard to imagine that even a conservative estimate of this number would be well below a million. If you include all scientific terms, then the score will even double. For example, science has already described about a million insects and estimates the number of yet undescribed insects at several million.
The two largest English dictionaries include half a million words (or lexemes) each - the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/h/howmanywords.html
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How many words are in Russian?
In Russian about 500 thousand words. But the most common words are only from 2000 to 2500. Even Pushkin, the great connoisseur and master of the Russian language, did not have all half a million words in literary speech, but only 21197. Scientists have found that the 100 most frequently occurring words make up 20% of oral and written speech . 1500-2000 words is already 85%. At the graduate high school vocabulary is between 1500 and 4000 words. In a person with higher education- up to 8000 words.

But 500 English words is already 70% of the literary language. As you can see, the languages ​​are quite different in expressiveness.

The Japanese Ministry of Education has identified 1,850 characters for everyday use, and 881 of them for study in primary and secondary schools. However, there are a number of characters that were used until the end of the Second World War, which are still needed to write names and addresses. Daily newspapers use about 400 characters. According to statistics, 2500-3000 characters make up 99.9% of the total number appearing in newspapers and magazines. The most complete Japanese dictionary contains 50,000 characters.

V.Pekelis "Cybernetic mixture", M., "Knowledge", 1991, pp. 323-324;
"IEEE Proc.", 1985, Vol.68, No.7
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Maze/8561/facts.htm
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Is it true that English has more words than any other language?

It is very likely that there are historical reasons for this:
- Old English belongs to Germanic Language Group. It is close to German and Dutch, sharing their grammar and vocabularies.
- After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English absorbed the Norman-French dialect, which became the language of the ruling class for many centuries.
- in addition to these two, English adopted much from Latin, which in the Middle Ages was the language of Science and the Church. The adoption of Latin began with the Roman conquest and entered into many toponyms.

Therefore, the vocabulary of English is much more extensive than the dictionaries of any of the Germanic or Romance (to which French and Latin belong) languages.
For these reasons, English traditionally easily absorbs any foreign words. With the rise of the British Empire, English became the language international communication and absorbed many foreign words from a wide variety of colonial sources (Indian, African, Australian, American, etc.)

"The dictionary of William Shakespeare, according to researchers, is 12,000 words. The dictionary of a Negro from the cannibalistic tribe of Mumbo-Yumbo is 300 words. Ellochka Shchukina easily and freely managed thirty"? ("The Twelve Chairs" by I. Ilf and E. Petrov).
The dictionary of the language of the great English playwright actually contains not 12, but 15 thousand words (according to other sources - about 20 thousand), and in the four-volume Dictionary of Pushkin's Language (M., 1956-1961) - 21,191 words. That is how many words scientists counted in all the works and letters of Pushkin, however, he used half of them only once. There are other opinions as well. In Spevak's concordance (1968) it is indicated that in the works of Shakespeare there are 29,066 lexemes (different words - different words) and 884,647 words in total (words altogether).
Pushkin's vocabulary is quite difficult to calculate due to the peculiarities of the Russian language. On average, if you get closer to the English interpretation, you get about 29,000 unique words.
In everyday communication, we usually use 1000 - 1500 words. This amount is quite enough for us to conduct a simple everyday conversation in our native language (at home, at work, in a store) and even cope with reading simple texts in another language with the help of a dictionary (basic English - 850 words).
The average Englishman, American, Canadian, etc. knows the meaning of about 75 thousand words, but not all words are actively used. In the dictionary of an infant aged one and a half to two years - no more than five dozen speech units.
According to the estimates of American researchers - The Global Language Monitor - English became the first language in which the vocabulary crossed the million mark.
The scientific rigor of their calculations, of course, can be questioned. One of the world's most respected specialists in English philology, David Crystal, believes that the "inventory" of the vocabulary is generally a meaningless undertaking.
Should we consider, say, abbreviations like CNN or IBM as words? Can English and American spellings of words be interpreted differently? Is it correct to include scientific terms in Latin in general statistics? Is it possible to call a "word" a designation containing numbers (Web 2.0)? And so on. Cristal estimates that the English lexicon is growing at a slower pace than The Global Language Monitor suggests, at about a thousand new words a year. But since there are no other, more reliable calculations, as well as statistics on the Russian language, one has to rely on official publications. It remains to trust the research and calculations of this American group of researchers.
Undoubtedly, Shakespeare's vocabulary is much richer than the vocabulary of his predecessors and reaches an impressive number of word signs in more than twenty thousand lexical units. It is far inferior to the vocabulary of twentieth-century realists, such as Galsworthy and London. Even a writer of little talent who describes and details the facts of the environment, especially a writer inclined towards naturalism, can overtake Shakespeare in this respect. So what? Quantity never determines quality!
In different cultures, the criteria for suitability, the admission of words in literary language. The European continental tradition is dominated by central planning, while the Anglo-Saxon islanders have an informal approach.
For example, the French vocabulary is subject to strict censorship by such an institution as the Academie Francais (Academy of the French Language). He decides which words belong to literary French and which do not. Due to such censorship, a situation has arisen where it can be recognized that in French, with all its richest literature, no more than 150,000-200,000 words.
AT English language the easiest way is to come up with a word and immediately enter it into the language. So, Shakespeare wrote that he came up with about 1.7 thousand words from his writer's dictionary of 20 thousand words. This, of course, is a huge achievement for a writer, only Pushkin exceeds it: 29 thousand words is an absolute and unsurpassed individual record for an active dictionary of all time.
Most educated Europeans actually, actively use no more than 8-10 thousand words, and passively (without adequate understanding) - 50 thousand or more.
The total number of words in the surviving literary monuments in ancient languages ​​is:
- in Latin - about 100,000 words;
- in ancient Greek - more than 100,000;
- in the Old Norse language - at least 100,000 words, of which about half have been preserved by written monuments that have survived to this day;
- in Sanskrit (literary language ancient india) - more than 200,000 words. Sanskrit is very rich in complex words made up of several roots (like Russian "loud" or "fast-jumping".
The Global Language Monitor analysis consisted of several stages. At the first stage, words were counted that were included in the most famous dictionaries of the English language: Merriam-Webster's, Oxford English Dictionary, Macquarie's. The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's dictionary includes 450,000 English words.
At the second stage, the company's employees, based on a special research algorithm, took into account all the neologisms of the English language. At the same time, texts on the Internet were analyzed, including blogs and other informal network resources. Periodicals were taken into account, both in electronic and paper form, novelties of literature of various directions. This technique in the work of Global Language Monitor raises doubts: when calculating the vocabulary of the English language, both obsolete words and phrases, and slang formations are included. In addition, this accounting method also takes into account words that are used only in varieties of English, for example, in China and Japan. This is about 20% of the total number of words that are recognized by the company's specialists. As lexical novelties of the English language, language blunders were also taken into account ...
Classical methods of counting words are much more conservative. For example, the Oxford Dictionary counts only 300,000 words as independently existing.
The English language not only creates its own, but also very actively borrows other people's words from the languages ​​of the whole world. Since the time of William the Conqueror, it has been half French. Now, when millions of people in multinational companies communicate in English, which is not their native language, whole complexes of the vocabulary of "Chinese English", "Latin American English", "Japanese English" arise. These vocabulary complexes belong to the so-called occasionalisms: words created by chance, for a single use.
There are also words that are used by a very narrow section of society. For example, one family, social group, territorial association. Or only in one social environment, terrain. Can this occasionalism be considered a full-fledged part of the vocabulary?
The main core of the language, both English and Russian, contains at least 250 and, according to experts, no more than 300 thousand words. To this, in both languages, one can add (or not add): archaisms and dialectisms (okhlobystnut, endova, veretyo, bright) - about 100-200 thousand more verbal formations; technical terms, mostly borrowed from the sciences (driver, caliper, molding, conjugation, hybridization, etc.) - at least 300-500 thousand; jargon, aka slang, which can be household, youth, journalistic, professional, gangster (cut, Windows, Cherkizon, PR man, setup) - another 100 thousand. It turns out about 700 thousand. Such a set of words is not difficult to "inflate" to a million: in Russian - by including derivative words like "overheated" or "underexamined", "symbiotic", in English - thanks to borrowings from Latin, Chinese, Arabic and Japanese. It is easy to simulate the opposite situation, when in Russian there will be under a million words, and in English - only 300 thousand.
More details about Pushkin's vocabulary: http://www.stihi.ru/2010/03/24/1825

How many words are in Russian and how many words are in English?

Threatening attempts to "debunk myths about the great and mighty"

It is well known that vocabulary various languages unequal. The lexicon of a civilized person can be dozens of times greater than the vocabulary of a representative of some wild African tribe. It is also clear that within the same language, the vocabulary of different speakers varies greatly: for a child and an adult, for a janitor and a professor ... In any case, no one doubts that a more extensive vocabulary is always associated with stock of knowledge and intellectual superiority. And now attention: what would you think if you were officially told that our Russian language is savage, contains five times fewer words than English? Of course, they would indignantly dispute this nonsense! However, such a "scientific opinion" is repeatedly broadcast in the media. This cannot but be alarming.

The last time this statement was made on television was in 2011. But it is easier to discuss and analyze not TV shows, but printed materials, which are easier to read (for example, on the Internet). So, you can look into the archive of the journal "Science and Life". In the 6th issue for 2009, a doctor of philological sciences (!), a certain Miloslavsky, was published under the mocking title "The Great, Mighty Russian Language". In it, the author "debunks the myths" about the Russian language. In particular, it is stated that "according to very rough estimates, the dictionaries of the English literary language contain about 400 thousand words, German - about 250 thousand, Russian - about 150 thousand". From which it is proposed to draw conclusions that "the wealth of the Russian language is a myth" (an almost verbatim quote). In general, the article is written in the spirit of self-spitting, characteristic of the early 90s; I was even somewhat struck by her anachronism. Not to mention the complete unscientific.

The author did not even mention the complexities and problems of counting words and, in general, the problem of the possibility and relevance of any scientific definition and comparison of the vocabulary of entire languages. I consider it necessary to raise the following objections.

1) In different cultures, the criteria for the "admission" of words into the literary language are different. The continental tradition is dominated by central planning, while the Anglo-Saxons have the element of the market in everything (informal approach). For example, the French vocabulary is subject to strict censorship by such an authority as the Academie Francais (Academy of the French Language). She decides which words belong to literary French and which do not. Due to such censorship, a situation has arisen where it is believed that in the French language, with all its richest literature, there are no more than 150,000-200,000 words. In English, everyone can come up with a word and immediately enter it into the language. So, Shakespeare wrote that he came up with about 1.7 thousand words from his writer's dictionary of 21 thousand words. By the way, this is a huge achievement for the writer, it is exceeded only by our Pushkin: 24 thousand words, an absolute and unsurpassed individual record of the active dictionary of all times - see "Pushkin's Dictionary of Language" in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961) . The majority of educated Europeans actively use no more than 8-10 thousand words, and passively use 50 thousand or more.

Obviously, the 150,000 Russian words named by the author of that article are a slightly rounded volume of the well-known Big Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (BAS), which in the 1970 edition in 17 volumes contained 131,257 words. And the English 400,000 are, apparently, the latest editions of Oxford and Webster. Moreover, in the penultimate editions of the same English dictionaries, there were several times fewer words (the specifics can be found on the Internet). Where does such an increase come from and why do their dictionaries contain more words than ours? The first reason is the shameless counting of archaisms, which modern Englishmen and Americans, of course, do not know. In the English philological tradition, the vocabulary of modern English is considered to be all words from the time of Shakespeare (a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov). In the Russian tradition, all pre-Petrine, and at the suggestion of the famous lexicographer Ushakov, even pre-Pushkin vocabulary is considered ancient or old Russian.

The second reason is that the criteria for "accepting" new words into the language have become even less stringent. Approaches to the English language are becoming more and more bold, the grades appearing on the Internet are simply fantastic. Thus, the GLM agency (Global Language Monitor, site www.languagemonitor.com) reports on the appearance of ... a millionth word in the English language! By the fact that the word is considered the millionth, it is immediately clear what kind of garbage dump they are trying to pass off the English language: this is the "word" of Web 2.0! And this is along with the fact that (the) web ("web") is considered a separate word. Obviously, Web 1.0 is also somewhere counted as a separate word! Moreover, they do not hesitate to count phrases as words: as 1,000,001 words, "financial tsunami" - "Financial tsunami" is counted. In this case, in Russian, along with the words "financial (th, th)" and "tsunami", there is the word "financial tsunami", which can be counted. However, the purists who composed the BAS are unlikely to include the word "tsunami" in it, since it is a foreign borrowing (see the next paragraph below on this).

2) English not only creates its own, but also very actively borrows other people's words from the languages ​​of the whole world. We complain about the dominance of English borrowings, but the layer of scientific, technical and business vocabulary that penetrated our language with the fall of the Iron Curtain is only a miserable handful compared to the active borrowings produced by the English language without any false embarrassment. Since the time of William the Conqueror, it has been half French. It turns out that we borrow borrowed! Or, figuratively speaking, we repurchase what we bought. And now, when millions of people in multinational companies communicate in English, which is not their native language, there are whole layers of vocabulary "Chinese English", "Latin American English", "Japanese English". These layers of vocabulary belong to the so-called occasionalisms.

Not only philologists like to argue about which language is the richest and most beautiful. Of course, for each person, his native language will be the best, most beautiful and, of course, the most unique.

There are no rules by which we could determine which language is the most harmonious and perfect. However, almost each has its own characteristics that distinguish it from all the others and give many reasons for pride to the people who speak it. In this article I will try to show just a little how diverse language map planets. In the future, I will return to this topic more than once, because each language has some amazing feature, thanks to which it can be considered a champion in a particular area.

And you can start the story just from the simplest - from the number of words in the language.

As for the richness of the vocabulary, here the leading position is occupied by Greek language: it has 5 million words. The English language, for example, contains only about half a million words. At the same time, we are unlikely to call English “poor”. This can only be said by someone who is not familiar with classical literature created in English, and has no idea how “capacious” this language is. Many will likely agree that The best way definitions of the “wealth” of a language are its expressive possibilities. And there are not many languages ​​that can compare with Russian and German. Is not it?

Now let's turn to the "poor" languages. Did you know that the Taki language spoken in parts of French Guinea has only 340 words? But even with such a modest vocabulary, people manage to communicate well with each other.

The Guinness Book of World Records doesn't have a "most beautiful language" category for obvious reasons, but instead there are plenty of other language records that are sure to surprise anyone. For example, the Abaza alphabet is considered the longest of the currently existing alphabets (by the way, 65 alphabets are used in the world). It has only 82 letters. The Cambodian alphabet is only slightly inferior to it: it consists of 74 letters. It is followed by the Khmer alphabet containing 72 letters. The shortest alphabet is found in the Rotokas language from the island of Bougainville (Papua New Guinea). It has only 11 letters. And in the Hawaiian alphabet, there is only one more - 12.

The earliest example of alphabetic writing was found in Ugarit (now Ras Sharma, Syria). It dates from around 1450 BC. and is a clay tablet with 32 cuneiform letters applied to it.

The most ancient letter is considered "o". It remained unchanged in the same form in which it was adopted in the Phoenician alphabet (about 1300 BC).

In English and Hungarian, the letter "E" is considered the most common.

The letter "Q" is the least used in modern European languages(the exception is French).

There are more than 20 synonyms for the word "snow" in the Eskimo language, and many more words for shades white color. It also has 63 forms of the present tense, and simple nouns have 252 inflections.

The inhabitants of Papua New Guinea speak about 700 languages ​​(this is about 10 percent of all languages ​​in the world). In addition, among these languages, there are many local dialects that are used to communicate with each other in neighboring villages.

The language of the North American Chippewa Indians contains the largest number of verb forms (there are about 6000 of them). In another Aboriginal language North America- haida - 70 prefixes are used, which is also a record.

In the Tabasaran language, common in Dagestan, there are 48 cases of nouns (in Hungarian, for example, there are only 24 of them, and in Russian - 6).

In Turkish, there is only one irregular verb - olmak ("to be"), and in English there are 283 such verbs.

There are three genders in Russian, German and Romanian, two in French, Danish and Swedish, one in Finnish and Hungarian, and four in the Australian aboriginal language Diirbalu: masculine, feminine, neuter and edible.

The largest number of consonants (80-85) is contained in the Ubykh language (the Abkhaz-Adyghe group of the Caucasian family), the smallest - 6 - in the Rotokas language (yes, yes, in the very one whose alphabet is considered the shortest).

The most vowels are in the Sedang language (Central Vietnam) - 55, and the least - in the Abkhazian (there are only 2 of them).

The most common sound is the vowel "a" - there is no language in which it would not be. There are languages ​​where "a" has different degrees of longitude (Slovak, Hungarian, etc.).

The Czech sound is recognized as the rarest, which is a conjointly pronounced “r” and “zh” - [rzh]. Even the closest relative of the Czech language, Slovak, cannot boast of this sound. It is also interesting to note that in Czech“rzh” is one of the main sounds: without it, it is impossible to pronounce such traditional folk names as “Jiri”, “Przemysl”, etc.

In the southern Bushman languages, there is another rare sound - a kind of click of the tongue. Even a special sign was invented to depict it on a letter.

In Japanese, there is no “l” sound familiar to Europeans. And at the same time, Japanese is rightfully called one of the most melodic languages ​​on the planet.

The largest number of values ​​has English word set (58 values ​​as a noun; 126 as a verb; 10 as a participle adjective). And is it possible after that to refuse practicality to native English speakers?

If we turn to Asian languages, then they seem to be completely “woven” from records. For example, in Chinese, where there are no verb conjugations or tenses, there is a huge vocabulary. And, of course, as befits a language whose history spans more than one millennium, Chinese can be proud of its amazing writing. The 40-volume Chinese dictionary Zhongwen Dajidian contains a total of 49,905 characters. The phoneme [i] in the IV tone has 84 meanings, and among them there are such as “clothes”, “hiccups” and “lousy”. In the written language, there are 92 hieroglyphs for the syllable [i] in tone IV. The most difficult is the hieroglyph [se] - "talkative", consisting of 64 lines. However, nowadays it is not actually used. Of the common this moment the most difficult is the hieroglyph "nan". It contains 36 dashes and means "stuffy nose". And if suddenly you decide to go to a Chinese pharmacy with complaints of a runny nose, you have every chance to depict this very hieroglyph on a piece of paper. And then you will certainly understand!

By the way, Mandarin Chinese is the most used language in the world, spoken by more than 885 million people. Spanish is in second place (332 million), English is third (322 million), and Bengali is fourth (189 million). By the way, Russian is in 7th place in this list (170 million) and is the most widely spoken language in Europe.

There are over 1,000 different languages ​​on the African continent. The Berber language of North Africa has no written form. And Afrikaans, known as the Boer language, was considered a dialect of Dutch until the early 20th century. And yet this language has no family ties with its African neighbors and belongs to the West Germanic group of languages. Unique case, is not it?

Some linguists also believe that Latin language has not ceased to be colloquial at all, it has only undergone minor changes. The closest relative of Latin is the Castilian language. According to some reports, Occitan and Sardinian can compete with it. All these languages ​​are so similar to Latin (even Italian differs from its distant ancestor much more than they do) that one can believe that the language of the ancient Romans lives on to this day. Latin, by the way, is recognized as "the most alive of dead languages". Its study is mandatory in many countries of the world, not only for philologists, but also for historians. Forced to understand Latin terminology also physicians. And not only them. Into mysteries Latin grammar just interested people get in.

There are about 5-6 thousand languages ​​in the world, and about two die every month.... Languages ​​disappear and appear. And each of them is interesting. It would be useful to talk about the curious features of some of them, if only in order to better understand how valuable is the language that you speak and love.

Kurkina AnaTheodora