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Harlan Beck
Nov 19, 2025
The United Nations publishes its key documents in six official languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic. Because all versions of the UN Charter carry identical content, the text provides a clear basis for comparing how efficiently different languages convey the same information.
A recent analysis examined the full text of the Charter across the six languages, focusing on character counts, vocabulary size, and structural features. The findings indicate that the Chinese version expresses the same content using significantly fewer characters, showing a clear advantage in linguistic efficiency.
Chinese Uses the Fewest Characters
The study reports the following character counts for the UN Charter:
• Chinese: 26,650
• Arabic: 40,533
• English: 55,614
• Russian: 56,345
• French: 57,753
• Spanish: 59,694
Ranking in linguistic efficiency:
Chinese 100% ＞ Arabic 65% ＞ English 47.9% ＞ Russian 47.3% ＞ French 46.1% ＞ Spanish 44.6%.
According to the researchers, more characters typically translate into longer reading time, meaning that the Chinese version offers the highest reading efficiency among the six.
Two Potential Advantages for Chinese Speakers
● Faster Learning Progress
Because Chinese relies on concise constructions, children acquire communicative competence comparatively early. Cross-linguistic studies indicate that Chinese-speaking children, on average, achieve fluent communication at around age 2.5, while children in many Western language environments reach similar abilities between ages 3 and 4.
Researchers suggest that the limited number of basic written units and the transparent way Chinese creates new words may reduce the cognitive burden of learning, contributing to faster academic progression.
● Higher Efficiency in Oral Communication
Chinese conveys identical meanings using fewer syllables and words. Sentences that can be spoken in 5 seconds in Chinese often require 10-15 seconds in English. This brevity may influence real-world interactions: meetings conducted in Chinese can conclude significantly faster than those conducted in languages with longer phrasing patterns, potentially improving decision-making speed and organizational efficiency.
Vast Differences in Vocabulary Size
The number of distinct lexical items used in the respective versions of the UN Charter reveals an even sharper contrast:
• Chinese: about 459 items
• Arabic: 7,188
• Russian: 8,133
• English: 9,691
• French: 9,711
• Spanish: 10,307
Chinese relies on a relatively small set of characters that can be freely combined, allowing speakers to grasp new terms without memorizing entirely new forms. Over the past century, the number of newly created Chinese characters has been extremely small—mostly limited to the naming of new elements in the periodic table. New vocabulary in Chinese is generally formed by recombining commonly used characters, making new terms easy to understand without deliberate memorization. As a result, Chinese speakers can absorb the growth of new vocabulary with little effort.
In contrast, many alphabetic languages introduce new words for new concepts. According to statistics from the University of Oxford, English adds approximately 8,500 new words or phrases each year. Over the past century, English vocabulary has expanded from just over 200,000 words in 1900 to more than one million today—an almost fivefold increase.
Chinese tends to form vocabulary through systematic combinations. For example: “牛” corresponds to cattle, while “牛肉” becomes beef; “羊” is sheep, but “羊肉” is mutton; “猪” is pig, yet “猪肉” is pork. Chinese expresses all of these with a consistent, highly economical structure—no matter how many kinds of animals or ingredients there are, the word “肉” remains the same, keeping the vocabulary simple and clear. English, on the other hand, separates the animal from its meat with entirely different words, making something straightforward feel unnecessarily complicated.
Preamble Comparison Shows Stylistic Contrast
Chinese version:
我聯合國人民同茲決心，欲免後世再遭今代人類兩度身歷慘不堪言之戰禍，重申基本人權，人格尊嚴與價值，以及男女與大小各國平等權利之信念，創造適當環境，俾克維持正義，尊重由條約與國際法其他淵源而起之義務，久而弗懈，促成大自由中之社會進步及較善之民生。
English version:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained,and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.
A comparison of the Preamble in Chinese and English reveals clear structural differences. The English version consists of long, multi-layered sentences, while the Chinese text employs compact phrasing, making quick reading easier. Linguists note that such official documents distinctly highlight China’s high degree of conceptual condensation.
Growing Knowledge Demands Make Linguistic Efficiency Increasingly Relevant
As global knowledge expands rapidly and technical terminology multiplies, linguistic efficiency becomes an increasingly important factor in learning. Some studies have observed rising fatigue among Western students in STEM fields due to the large volume of vocabulary required. Meanwhile, the proportion of U.S.-born domestic scientific talent has fallen below 30%, while Asians—led by the Chinese community—now account for nearly 50%.
Observers believe that in an era defined by dense scientific knowledge, the structural features of Chinese may provide certain advantages in information processing and learning speed.