Languages cool as they expand: allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
Date
2012-12-10
Authors
Petersen, Alexander M.
Tenenbaum, Joel N.
Havlin, Shlomo
Stanley, H. Eugene
Perc, Matjaz
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Alexander M. Petersen, Joel N. Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, H. Eugene Stanley, Matjaz Perc. 2012. "Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words." SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, Volume 2. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00943
Abstract
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two scaling regimes characterize the word frequency distributions, with only the more common words obeying the classic Zipf law. Using corpora of unprecedented size, we test the allometric scaling relation between the corpus size and the vocabulary size of growing languages to demonstrate a decreasing marginal need for new words, a feature that is likely related to the underlying correlations between words. We calculate the annual growth fluctuations of word use which has a decreasing trend as the corpus size increases, indicating a slowdown in linguistic evolution following language expansion. This “cooling pattern” forms the basis of a third statistical regularity, which unlike the Zipf and the Heaps law, is dynamical in nature.
Description
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.