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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