Word-use is roughly Zipf-distributed [0] in most all modern languages, so there's not much difference in the number of commonly used words (as long as you ignore basic differences like the existence of articles and the richness of word inflection).
An analysis of English and French texts on Project Gutenburg shows that 93 words account for half of English usage, versus 89 for French [1]. English has fewer words in the middle of the distribution (696 versus 795 at 70%) and in the near tail (6,428 versus 9,050 at 90%, and 14,736 versus 21,231 at 95%), but more in the extreme tail.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
1. http://1.1o1.in/en/webtools/semantic-depth
