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

By Alexander M. Petersen, Josh Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, H. Eugene Stanley, Matjaz Perc. 2012

244 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Cultural Studies

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Citations in the corpus

Long short‐term memory networks for CSI300 volatility prediction with Baidu search volume (2018, background): “The increasing volumes of ’big data’ reflecting various aspects of our everyday activities represent a vital new opportunity for scientists to address fundamental questions about the complex world we inhabit [11, 12, 15].”
Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution (2015, methodology): “Divergences then remain relatively steady until the mid-20th century, then continue to decline gradually over time, which may be consistent with previous findings of decreased rates of word introduction and increased rates of word obsolescence in many Google Books data sets over time [8] and a slowi”
How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age (2016, background): “The smaller estimates agree with the observation of Roberts et al. (2009) that the number of social contacts people have is limited to some 150, although of course people know many more names (of humans and places) than the individuals they have personal relationships with.”