I know there are people who speak a ridiculous amount of languages, and at that point there’s a lot of similarity in etymology, but overall I’m curious if speaking 20 languages is something any human can do, or if it takes a different kind of brain than average to retain that many words, phrases, idioms, and grammar rules?
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From: Vocabulary Size and Auditory Word Recognition in Preschool Children, NIH National Library of Medicine, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5400288/
>After children begin understanding words in the first year of life, their receptive vocabulary size increases rapidly. At age one, children recognize about 50 words; by age three, they recognize about 1,000 words; and by age five, they recognize at least 10,000 words.
From a couple of references I’ve read, a typical adult levels out in the 40,000 to 50,000 words range, but we continue to acquire new words through adulthood, just at a much slower rate. “Receptive vocabulary” is words that one understands. The words we commonly use in conversation would be a smaller subset of that.
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The world record for fluency is 42 languages, held by Powell Janulus. Many of the languages are European, with a lot of crossover in the vocabulary–however, there are also a fair number of Middle Eastern and East Asian languages among them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Janulus
2000 words is considered the minimum for carrying a conversation, and he is able to converse in all of them. So, that’s a minimum of 84,000 words (but obviously much more than that, counting his native language alone). It’s hard to say what the average person is capable of (since the average person just isn’t interested in learning that many languages), but there’s at least the upper bound!
This 2016 study estimated that a 60-year-old with a large vocabulary knows about 56k English words. I wouldn’t take that as an indication of the maximum that’s possible—for example, I imagine that many of those people also know many words in other languages.
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Top scrabble player in the world has memorized the full English (280,000) lexicon and full French lexicon (386,000). As an adult he memorized those 386,000 words in a period of a few months preparing for a tournament.
It should be noted that this approach only memorizes the words and not the meaning. Especially in the French case, he did not know what the words meant – he just knew they were valid words which is all that is needed for scrabble.