SELF-SIMILARITY IN THE TAXONOMIC CLASSIFICATION OF HUMAN LANGUAGES

Damian H. Zanette ()
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Damian H. Zanette: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Centro Atómico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro, 8400 Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2001, vol. 04, issue 02n03, 281-286

Abstract: Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to each member decays as a power law. This feature reveals that a self-similar structure underlies the taxonomy of languages, exactly as observed in the taxonomic classification of biological species. Such an analogy is a clue to the evolutionary foundation of language classification based on long-range comparison.

Keywords: Language classification; taxonomic trees; power-law distributions; fractals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525901000206

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