Scaling laws language evolution

Abstract

The emergence of complex language is one of the fundamental hallmarks of human evolution. It shaped and constrained the emergence of social structures and makes us different from other animals. Beyond their differences, several remarkable features indicate the presence of fundamental principles of organization shared by all known languages. The best known is the so called Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of a word decays as a (universal) power law of its rank. A different, but related property of human language involves the architecture of word interactions. It has been recently shown that linguistic webs of different types display a global organization that is not very different from the ones observed in other natural and artificial complex networks, from the genome to the internet. In this chapter we explore the statistical features displayed by these seemingly universal laws and their possible origins. It is shown that fundamental principles of organization pervade the origin of power laws in human language and shape its evolutionary history.