Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words

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...

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Main Authors:	Petersen, Alexander M., Tenenbaum, Joel N., Havlin, Shlomo, Stanley, H. Eugene, Perc, Matjaž
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Nature Publishing Group 2012
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3517984/

id	pubmed-3517984
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-35179842012-12-10 Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž Article 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. Nature Publishing Group 2012-12-10 /pmc/articles/PMC3517984/ /pubmed/23230508 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep00943 Text en Copyright © 2012, Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž
spellingShingle	Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
author_facet	Petersen, Alexander M. Tenenbaum, Joel N. Havlin, Shlomo Stanley, H. Eugene Perc, Matjaž
author_sort	Petersen, Alexander M.
title	Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
title_short	Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
title_full	Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
title_fullStr	Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
title_full_unstemmed	Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
title_sort	languages cool as they expand: allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
description	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.
publisher	Nature Publishing Group
publishDate	2012
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3517984/
_version_	1611939128070373376

Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words

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