When I moved to the Netherlands over 10 years ago, I had taken several tests to find out how big my vocabulary was. Out of several questionnaires, I averaged a vocabulary of 60,000 words. In case you were wondering, knowing the usage and meaning of 16% of English words is pretty impressive. I could read things like Hobbes’s “Leviathan” without breaking a sweat or reaching for a dictionary.
But I have now lived in a strange land for 10 years and Dutch takes up quite a bit of my head space. So, what affect, if any, has this had on my mother tongue? The fine folks at Dictionary.com have created a vocabulary test/builder called Word Dynamo. And one of the first steps in this system is to find the extent of your current vocabulary. According to this service, my stockpile of English esoteric words has shrunk to a mere 42,689 words. This isn’t really a problem, per se. I mean, how often am I going to be called on to know the definition and usage of words more complex and antiquated than “sesquipedalian”, a word so long and obscure that the spell-check in my web browser insists that I am spelling it incorrectly (I’m not)?
No, I think in a world that relies on English as the default language of international commerce and the internet, the full extent of the richness of the English vocabulary will be pruned away. Not quite to the level of Newspeak, but a definite sloughing off of obscurantist verbiage.
