Zipf and heaps laws? Coefficients depend on language

Abstract

We observed that the coefficients of two important empirical statistical laws of language ? Zipf law and Heaps law ? are different for different languages, as we illustrate on English and Russian examples. This may have both theoretical and practical implications. On the one hand, the reasons for this may shed light on the nature of language. On the other hand, these two laws are important in, say, full-text database design allowing predicting the index size.