Abstract
In this paper we report a high positive association between societal complexity and size of a language's lexicon in terms of total number of dictionary entries. Small-scale societies have many fewer lexical items than large-scale societies. However, when specialist terms are ex cluded, the correlation between societal complexity and size of lexi con falls off, probably to zero. We also show that languages spoken in societies of varying complexity contain radically different constel lations of lexical items.
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