English Has the Richest Vocabulary
Number of human languages and dialects: 6,912
Number of words in the English language: 500,000 according to the number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. There are supposedly another 500,000 uncataloged technical and scientific terms. By comparison, most estimates indicate that German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 words and French and Spanish have fewer than 100,000 words.
Number of people who use English: 750 million
Number of people for whom English is their mother tongue: 350 million
Percent of information stored on the world's computer in English: 80%
Percent of world's technical and scientific periodicals in English: >50%
Official language of the Olympics: English
Default language of aviation and air traffic control: English
3 Comments:
Where does this data come from? Everything from the Oxford English Dictionary?
You have know idea what are u talking about.
Greek, has the biggest vocabulary overall, with 5 million words and 70 million word types.
English has only 790.000 words and 12% of its vocabulary has Greek origin.
Greek words form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary.
Greek has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records.
Its the longest living language
In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of the Christian Bible.
I believe English does have the largest vocabulary because the modern world entails naming more things, however, Greek probably has more word types. Greek and German both are able to create words easily. Most languages can probably, at least borrow words, if not create vocabularies. More importantly for a language is syntax, and Greek has the most supple syntax, therefore, allowing for easy expression.
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