On the Power-Law Distribution of Language Family Sizes  

Oleh:

Wichmann , Søren

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Linguistics (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST & JSTOR) vol. 41 no. 1 (Mar. 2005), page 117-131.
Fulltext: 117-131.pdf (1.73MB)

Isi artikel

When the sizes of language families of the world, measured by the number of languages contained in each family, are plotted in descending order on a diagram where the x-axis representst he place of each family in the rank-order( the largest familyh avingr anki , the next-largestr, ank2 , and so on) and the y-axisr epresenttsh e numbero f languagesi n the family determiningt he rank-orderingi,t is seen that the distributionc losely approximateas curved efinedb y the formulay =ax b. Such 'power-law'd istributionsa re knownt o characterizea wide rangeo f social, biological, and physicalp henomenaa nd are essentiallyo f a stochasticn ature.I t is suggested that the apparent power-law distribution of language family sizes is of relevance when evaluatingo verallc lassificationso f the world'sl anguages,f or the analysiso f taxonomics tructures,f or developingh ypothesesc oncerningt he prehistoryo f the world's languages, and for modelling the future extinction of language families.

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