The Distribution of Phoneme Frequencies across the World's Languages: Macroscopic and Microscopic Information-Theoretic Models
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a symmetric Dirichlet distribution whose single concentration parameter scales systematically with phonemic inventory size, revealing a robust compensation effect whereby larger inventories exhibit lower relative entropy. Microscopically, a Maximum Entropy model incorporating constraints from articulatory, phonotactic, and lexical structure accurately predicts language-specific phoneme probabilities. Together, these findings provide a unified information-theoreti...
| Authors | Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín, Suchir Salhan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 March 2026 |
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