The originality of the study involves identifying semantic motivation of functional features of the Yakut collective nouns, which is surely of interest from the viewpoint of studying the language in the functional and semantic aspect. The lexical stratum expressing the quantitative concept of generalization in the Yakut language was divided into three basic lexico-semantic groups: collective nouns denoting the multitude of people and objects as the inseparable whole, nouns with the meaning of generalization used to count discrete objects and collective substantial nouns used to designate a certain weight and size of non-discrete objects.