Language Comparison: Number of Different Words
4,737,087
Published 2020-07-17
Disclaimer:
Only words of languages with over 20 million speakers are included otherwise the video would get too long. The only exceptions are the top 5. Thus apologies if your language is not included.
Only Alphabets with a usage of above 50 million, according to World Atlas, are included, with some exceptions. Video makes no distinction between speech, dialect and literacy.
Number referenced for words tend to be the largest dictionary that can be found online. Dictionary referenced in video. There may be bigger dictionaries though.
Usage or number of words may be outdated, but are often after 2010. More info in references.
There is difficulty researching between different formal definition of letters, diacritics and circumflexes, whichever probability and number given for the Alphabets are stated in the sources. There may be unintentional mistake, kindly comment if spotted.
Sources and References: pastebin.com/Ahx6TT0B
Music: Adventure by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
List of Languages and Words featured:
Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Latin, Malay, Marathi, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese.
List of Alphabets and Scripts featured:
Arabic Alphabet, Armenian Alphabet, Bengali Alphabet, Burmese Alphabet, Chinese Characters, Cyrillic Alphabet, Danish Alphabet, Devanagari Alphabet, Dutch Alphabet, Filipino Alphabet, Finnish Alphabet, French Alphabet, German Alphabet, Greek Alphabet, Hebrew Alphabet, Hungarian Alphabet, Icelandic Alphabet, Italian Alphabet, Japanese Kana, Japanese Kanji, Kangxi Radicals, Khmer Alphabet, Hangul Alphabet, Kurdish Alphabet, Latin Alphabet, Lithuanian Alphabet, Polish Alphabet, Portuguese Alphabet, Spanish Alphabet, Swedish Alphabet, Tamil Alphabet, Telugu Alphabet, Thai Alphabet,Turkish Alphabet, Vietnamese Alphabet, Welsh Alphabet.
All Comments (21)
-
Do pause the video when the "English Words" appear. What is the first word that you see?
-
You forgot one language tho’ The doctors handwriting
-
when you realize that Iceland has more words than citiziens...
-
As a native speaker of musical melodies, I can confirm that this is the number of words we have.
-
Interesting facts 1. Korean is the language with second smallest number of alphabet, and biggest number of words. 2. There are total 74,419 Chinese characters in unicord, but it is approximated that there are total 88,000~90,000 existing Chinese characters. This is because there are so many synonyms. 3. The number of Chinese characters actually being used varies with countries. For example 1800 in Korea, 2136 in Japanese, 3500 in China. 4. Chinese characters are too complex to use, so Japan and China respectively simplified Chinese characters to make it more simple and easy to use. Japan's one is called as "Japanese Kanji". 5. It'd be nice if the video also explains about the "binary language" used by computers. It only has two alphabet: '0' and '1'.
-
YouTube: Just one more video. Netflix: Just one more episode. Chinese: Just one more character.
-
Korean letters: 24 Korean words: 1,100,000
-
1:25 correction: Tamil isn't a character system, it's an Alphasyllabary like the Devanagari script, which means that most of the 200+ 'characters' you've mentioned are letter combos that are found in Hindi too. By that logic even Hindi should be listed as having 200+ symbols.
-
As Korean, we'd used Chinese characters for almost half of vocabularies like Japanese 'til just several decades ago. So Korean words were influenced a lots by Chinese characters. And cause of the traits of 'em, we've got massive, a number of vocabularies even now.
-
“What language do you speak?” “Mathematics symbols.”
-
Theres still this one dude that thinks English came from USA
-
One question I have, when you showed the table of languages in the Latin alphabet, in the Portuguese part, did you use Portuguese from which country exactly, because the letters removed I even agree but regarding the variants and additions, it does not agree with my knowledge of Portuguese. Just a question.
-
If you use Korean Alphabet, you can describe whole of universe with only 24 letters.
-
Everyone: finally a video that doesn’t end with YOU Reigarw Comparisons: 3:31
-
So unique, crazy how people create so many different ways to communicate with each other.
-
母語の安心感
-
Thanks for sharing this video! While it's interesting to learn about the number of words in different languages, it's important to ensure that the information we share is accurate. In the case of Arabic, the figure mentioned in the video (120,000 words) is incorrect. This number could be a misconception based on the fact that Arabic has around 120,000 root words, which are the basic building blocks of its vocabulary. However, these roots can be combined and modified in countless ways to create new words, so the actual number of words in Arabic far exceeds 120,000. In fact, Arabic is a very rich and complex language, with a vast vocabulary that exceeds 12 million words when we consider all its different dialects and variations. It's worth noting that Arabic is not only spoken in the Arab world, but also in many other countries, and its vocabulary has been constantly evolving throughout history. It's always fascinating to learn more about the diversity and complexity of languages, and I appreciate this video for sparking this conversation.
-
Everyone gangsta until someone speak in fluent MUSICAL LANGUAGE
-
Somebody online: So what language do you speak? Me: starts typing musical notes
-
You might want to add Inuit Syllabics to your list. They're pretty cool.
