Sõnavarade

Sõnavarade is an Estonian word form that represents the genitive plural of sõnavara, meaning "vocabulary" or "lexicon". As a grammatical form, sõnavarade is used to indicate possession, relationship or attribution involving multiple vocabularies—for example when discussing the vocabularies of several languages, dialects, subject fields or speaker groups.

In linguistic and educational contexts, the term often appears when comparing, cataloguing or analysing different lexical repertoires: sõnavarade suurus (size of vocabularies), sõnavarade kattuvus (vocabulary overlap), or sõnavarade omandamine (acquisition of vocabularies). It can refer to active (productive) versus passive (receptive) vocabularies, specialist terminology, or the stock of words known by distinct communities.

Discussion of sõnavarade intersects with lexis, lexicography and corpus linguistics, where researchers measure, describe and visualise word sets. In language teaching, attention to sõnavarade guides curriculum design, vocabulary selection and assessment. The form is also used in sociolinguistic and dialectal studies to highlight variation: eri sotsiaalsete rühmade või piirkondade sõnavarade võrdlus (comparison of vocabularies across social groups or regions).

As a morphological variant, sõnavarade illustrates how Estonian marks plurality and grammatical relations through case endings, enabling precise expression of relationships among multiple lexical inventories.