THE MYTH OF THE SMALL VOCABULARY.

It is sometimes said that “primitive peoples” (or welfare mothers, in a particularly obnoxious use of the trope) have a pathetically small vocabulary—a thousand words, perhaps. I’ve just found an excellent essay by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg (the language maven of Fresh Air, among other things) debunking this nonsense. By the way, although Nunberg doesn’t give a figure, the average adult vocabulary appears to be somewhere around 40,000-50,000 words (or, if you believe Steven Pinker, not one of my heroes, something closer to 60,000). (Thanks to Jonathan Mayhew for pointing me in this direction.)

Addendum. Check out the other essays at Nunberg’s homepage; there are eminently sensible ones on American attempts to pronounce “Iraq” and “Qatar” (and foreign names in general) and on the use of “Gallic” and other symptoms of our conflicted Francophobia, inter alia.

Comments

  1. Wow, he even uses eke out correctly.

  2. And yet when linguists look at those languages, they always turn out to have vocabularies that are more than rich enough to express the complexity of a people’s experience. [Nunberg]

    That’s plenty consistent with claiming that (say)

    There are about six times more words in the English language than in French. As of 2021 the Complete Oxford Dictionary has 600,000 unique words against 100,000 words (totalling 350,000 meanings) for the Grand Robert

    Most Māori dictionaries contain between 10,000 and 20,000 word entries. If every Māori word that ever appeared in print was counted the number may reach 100,000.
    [That latter figure needs treating with caution: Māori features prolific wortbildung.]

    the average adult vocabulary appears to be somewhere around 40,000-50,000 words

    That’s 50,000 that you might produce yourself? Or that you might recognise/understand in general (non-specialist subject) usage? Is an English speaker’s passive vocabulary (words they recognise) greater than a French speaker? Because English has both a Germanic and a Norman word for everyday vocab.

    Nunberg doesn’t do nearly enough to define his terms. So he hasn’t shown the claims he starts with are “canards”. It’s an exercise in wokeness.

  3. David Eddyshaw says

    Quite so: languages definitely do differ quite substantially in their total number of lexemes, not only in terms of how many of them that lexicologists have been able to capture and imprison in dictionaries, but in how many are in active use by normal speakers.

    This, of course, has no bearing on what can be expressed in the language. The fact that many lexemes in language A have a broader semantic range than in language B does not mean that speakers of language A cannot say anything that speakers of language B can: they just do it by employing other resources, like syntactic composition or metaphor, or are maybe just less bothered by theoretical ambiguities that hardly ever actually matter in real-life contexts.

    And one of the strategies may indeed be derivation, which lexicographers may arbitrarily treat differently in different languages.

    One of the many things I like about Ashton’s Swahili grammar is that she actually points out that Swahili lexemes often have a much broader semantic range than English lexemes (already showing that you’re reading something better than a typical teaching grammar), and then immediately talks about the precision of Swahili, with its exuberant and productive system of verb derivation, fine tense distinctions encoded by verbs in composition, and subtle grammatical encoding of focus.

    However, it’s also true enough that “small” vocabularies are often simply reflections of inadequate documentation. (Even I know several Kusaal words, learnt from my informants, which appear in none of the extant dictionaries, and am still continually encountering more even in the few published materials I can find that I haven’t seen before: all this must be a pale reflection of the true size of the lexicon, which has just not been documented anything like fully.)

    And Kusaal, of course, makes numerous lexical distinctions that English does not: for example, like most Oti-Volta languages, it has distinct, underived, verbs for carrying something on the back, on the hip, in the hand, in both hands, or on the head. One can only marvel at the poverty of the English lexicon here (though one must concede that speakers of English can express the relevant concepts, despite this severe linguistic handicap, thus proving my point.)

  4. The OED does not represent anybody’s language. It is the union of the recorded vocabularies of idiolects and dialects of what we call “English” over a millennium. It includes the specialized vocabularies of farriers and furriers and heraldry and thievery and chemistry and alchemy and geology and topology, and names for every bird and mammal everywhere in the world.

    There’s an underlying idea that a language has an ideal, represented by a dictionary and a grammar, to which its speakers may aspire, but which they seldom reach. Hence the ignorant may claim that X is not a word, because it isn’t in the dictionary. And, I suppose, it’s not far from learned claims about langue or Universal Grammar. I don’t think that’s how it works.

  5. Nunberg contradicts himself without realizing it apparently. While yes, it is true that lower class speakers are perfectly capable of expressing everything necessary for a normal emotional and functional life, Nunberg admits that Most of the edge that educated people have is in the words we need to talk about topics like politics, historical ideas, technical subjects, and the like.

    That’s a very significant edge! It makes all the difference in the symbol analyst favoring society we live in. Political and economic power derive in large part from the ability of the upper classes to manipulate language.

    I agree with Nunberg that it is wrong to be condescending towards people with smaller vocabularies, but they certainly exist and often suffer significant disadvantages precisely because of their inability to communicate effectively.

  6. PlasticPaddy says

    “Political and economic power derive in large part from the ability of the upper classes to manipulate language.” I think manipulate is unfortunate and should be replaced by “employ effectively”. Also the upper classes now leave the talking mainly to the leisured middle classes (i.e., disproportionately current and former student activists) and idle elements of the “working” classes. I would say that power is derived from cohesion and persuasion (reinforced by use of language and social incentives) but ultimately from the ability to deliver acceptable lives to the governed, where acceptable means “when compared to the lives of the previous generation”.

  7. David Marjanović says

    Political and economic power derive in large part from the ability of the upper classes to manipulate language.

    That has nothing to do with the size of the vocabulary: Orwell, Trump.

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    Yes: the idea that eloquence is the key to political power is a comforting illusion favoured by the eloquent.

    Unfortunately, so is the idea that power ultimately depends on the ability to deliver acceptable lives to the govermed. Even democracies are now being subverted by those who have discovered how easy it can be to get people to vote directly against their own interests by stoking their hatred and fear. New enemies both without and within can always be manufactured as needed: the technique has no sell-by date.

    If you’re an autocrat, the welfare of those you rule is of no concern, and it is easier to crush the wretched and weak than the prosperous and strong. Immiseration is your ally, so long as your personal army is well-fed.

  9. All of that is true, and I suspect discussions of such things tend to be vitiated to a greater or lesser extent by people’s unwillingness or inability to face the facts without either succumbing to despair or identifying with the powerful and celebrating their actions and attitudes (“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”). There have been decently run polities without excessive amounts of immiseration and cruelty, so the thing is not impossible, but how to achieve it in a world of would-be Conans: there’s the rub.

  10. PladticPaddy says

    @de, dm, hat
    All correct, and I am sorry for making “ultimately” do a lot of work in what I wrote (also “persuasion”, which includes “by means of armies, secret police, etc.”). The mills of the Lord…

  11. Large vocabulary can work against you. Hilary Clinton’s “deplorable” marked her as over-educated and resorting to mush-mouth euphemisms, and hence elitist (that aside from the misrepresentation of the comment.)

  12. the idea that eloquence is the key to political power is a comforting illusion favoured by the eloquent.

    Yes, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. I am talking about the difference in vocabulary that gets you into a better university, and then maybe gets you into a law school or business school and keeps you in the upper middle class. It’s not a one to one correspondence obviously. I have a good friend who never went to college but reads quite a bit, and I am quite sure has a larger active vocabulary than Trump or MTG. But I would be surprised if there is not some correlation between active vocabulary and social class.

    I do agree with your other points.

  13. I am talking about the difference in vocabulary that gets you into a better university, and then maybe gets you into a law school or business school and keeps you in the upper middle class.

    But you said specifically “Political and economic power.” If you’d said “social prominence” nobody would have quarreled with it.

  14. Doesn’t social prominence bring real economic and political power along with it?

  15. No.

  16. I mean, I could give you boatloads of examples of decayed aristos who get forelocks tugged in their direction when they dodder down the street but have no power over anyone, and strongmen who come from nowhere and nothing, but come on, you can think of these things yourself.

  17. Not to mention that the people who most famously have a large vocabulary — writers and academics — have a collective political power of zero.

  18. David Marjanović says

    I am talking about the difference in vocabulary that gets you into a better university, and then maybe gets you into a law school or business school and keeps you in the upper middle class.

    Scrolling up, I find that the discussion is indeed general, not about a few specific countries. So… over here, there is no such thing as a better university. The very concept of a bad university is lacking. Practically all universities are public-owned, financed entirely out of the federal budget deficit; they don’t compete with each other any more than Starbucks places do.

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