Zipf's law in 50 languages: its structural pattern, linguistic interpretation, and cognitive motivation

Understand

Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law.

• However, there is much dispute whether it is a universal law or a statistical artifact, and little is known about what mechanisms may have shaped it.
• To answer these questions, this study conducted a large scale cross language investigation into Zipf's law.
• The statistical results show that Zipf's laws in 50 languages all share a 3-segment structural pattern, with each segment demonstrating distinctive linguistic properties and the lower segment invariably bending downwards to deviate from theoretical expectation.