I understand from the Global Language Monitor (GLM) that as of December 30, 2006, at precisely 10:34 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, the English language hit the 991,833-word mark. The California-based language watchdog says that it has been using a proprietary algorithm, the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), to measure the wealth of English words as currently found in the print and electronic media as well as on the Internet and in blogs. It has been tracking English since 2003 despite dismissive criticism from such eminent language authorities as the
Oxford English Dictionary, which stood pat at this time on its official count of 615,000 entries for English.*
Now, no matter what the exact figures are, English has such an astoundingly large vocabulary to pack into one’s brain, and I really think that unless we are aspiring to become Spelling Bee or Scrabble champions, we don’t need to get to know even a fifth or much less of that huge cavalcade of English words. After all, some language experts say, only about 200,000 of those words are in common usage, and all that a typical native-English-speaking college graduate needs to be functionally literate in English is about 20,000-25,000 words.
This self-appointed language watchdog has aggressively used a proprietary algorithm that it calls
the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) to measure the ever-growing wealth of English words
And when we ponder these figures, we mustn’t forget that William Shakespeare had gotten by so magnificently with a vocabulary of only 18,000 to 25,000 words, of which 1,700—such as “anchovy,” “besmirch,” “impede,” and “shudder”—are thought to have been Shakespeare’s own coinage. We must consider, too, that the
King James Bible, using only 12,143 different English words, has done quite an impressive job evangelizing a lot of English-literate heathens on this planet. And for an even better perspective, here’s another intriguing language statistic: Taki-Taki, an English-based Creole spoken in coastal Suriname in South America, is said to consist of only 340 basic words, yet allows its speakers to get on quite well with their day-to-day affairs.
Perhaps we should also take the opportunity to look at how the world’s other major languages are faring in the face of this explosive growth of English. I understand that German has held to second place with a vocabulary of about 185,000 common words, followed by French with something like 100,000. Chinese, of course, remains the world’s most widely spoken language, but since it uses ideograms and not the alphabet, I’m afraid we can’t put it into our comparative picture. But it definitely would be remiss if we didn’t take up the vocabulary performance of Tagalog, the base language of Filipino, our national language.
From what I can gather at this time, Tagalog has some 17,000 root-words, and it’s possible that its number of intelligible words is between 50,000 and 60,000. The Tagalog-English Dictionary published in 1986 by Fr. Leo James English, a Manila-based Australian Roman Catholic priest, lists 16,000 of Tagalog’s main words, while his former project assistant, Vito Santos, along with co-author Luningning Santos, later came up with the
Vicassan’s Pilipino-English Dictionary in 1988, listing 20,000 Tagalog words.
So to be functionally literate in both Filipino and English, the typical Filipino college graduate needs a basic vocabulary of 16,000-20,000 Tagalog words and something like, say, 25,000-35,000 English words, for a combined Filipino-English vocabulary of 41,000-55,000 words. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round that off to 50,000.
Now, that’s not such a frightening vocabulary quota for the Filipino as a native Tagalog speaker and nonnative English learner. Just achieving its English component, in fact, would already make him or her more proficient than the average American, whose English vocabulary reportedly runs to only about 14,000 words. And as I used to often point out in my English-improvement seminars, we can actually get by with much fewer and simpler words and yet make ourselves much more communicative. Yes, a wide English vocabulary definitely is nice to have, but in the end, what matters more is developing our ability to know and adroitly tap the words that are already inside the heads of our fluent domestic Filipino-and-English-speaking target audiences.
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*Global Language Monitor founder and Paul JJ Payack, who calls himself a word analyst and not a lexicographer, estimated in 2006 that the number of English words would breach the 1-millionth mark by November of that year based on a complex algorithm he had been using for years to track the growth of words and phrases. However, a noted lexicographer and dictionary editor disparaged Payack’s estimate as “a silly thing” and “complete rubbish.” (Read “A Million Words? He’s Counting On It,” CBSNews.com,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-million-words-hes-counting-on-it/).
This essay first appeared in my “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times
and subsequently became Chapter 155 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge
, ©2009 and published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times
:The wealth of our vocabulary Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.Next week (June 6, 2024):
Keeping our English prose trim and slimRELATED EARLIER READING IN THE FORUM:No matter what we and the language experts might call him—word maven, English logophile, “The WordMan,” “a fraud,” or “self-aggrandizing scammer”—Paul J.J. Payack has kicked up a worldwide linguistic storm trumpeting the supposed eminent arrival of the one-millionth English word. The Harvard-educated, California-based president of the Global Language Monitor has literally taken North American media for a fun, exhilarating ride—some linguists say he has been astutely conning them—by making them indiscriminately report his pronouncements about the race of new English words to the 1-millionth mark.
"How to Generate a Linguistic Tsunami by Really Trying," June 13, 2009
