You're talking about very subtle effects that have more to do with an individual than with a speech community. English has so many "standard" words because the

You're talking about very subtle effects that have more to do with an individual than with a speech community. English has so many "standard" words because the speech community became unusually eager to borrow them from other languages after the Norman conquest (The Anglo-Saxons were actually quite reluctant to do so before). Many speakers of other languages are now just as eager to borrow words from English (or other languages). Look at the pervasiveness of Spanglish and Hinglish, even though they are broadly considered non-standard by the speech community. A Spanish speaker will find just as many different words to describe something as an English speaker if they bother to try. The hoax is that a language systematically shapes the patterns of thought of the entire speech community in profound ways. There is actually consensus among linguists that it can shape thinking of very subtle ways, however. Noun-gendering is one. A bridge is masculine in French: "le pont". It's feminine in German: "die Bruecke". A French-speaker is more likely to think of a bridge as "strong" or "sturdy", and a German is more likely to describe it as "elegant". But this does not rise to the level of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that a language limits its speakers' view of the world.