All languages of the world follow the same statistical law

The phenomenon of human communication, traditionally considered as a manifestation of creativity and free will, turns out to be subject to a strict mathematical law. The central place in this study is occupied by Zipf’s law, discovered by linguist George Zipf almost eighty years ago.

The law shows that the frequency of use of a word is inversely proportional to its ordinal number in the popularity rating. In practice, this means that the most common word occurs twice as often as the second, three times as often as the third, and so on. For example, the English “the” demonstrates this pattern.

Surprisingly, this principle is universal: it works in all languages – from English and Spanish to Hindi and Mandarin, as well as in texts that have not yet been deciphered, including the mysterious Voynich manuscript. Statistical analysis of classical literature, from Shakespeare to Darwin, confirms the accuracy of the law on large volumes of text.

Scientists note that Zipf’s law ignores the meaning of words and context, subordinating linguistic activity to pure probabilistic patterns.

Zipf himself attributed the effect to the “principle of least effort”: speakers minimize cognitive load by using a limited set of familiar words, while listeners demand accuracy supported by rare terms. Other hypotheses suggest the influence of memory and social copying mechanisms, when popular words become even more common.

Despite decades of research, there is no single explanation for the law. Nevertheless, its universality shows that human language is not only a means of communication, but also part of a deep statistical structure of reality that governs information as inexorably as physical laws.
 

04.01.2026 14:52 Natalia Mikolayenko

My comment.

There’s nothing to say about the idiot journalist: She had almost forgotten the pre-school concepts of direct and inverse proportionality. The woman wanted to write “SOMETHING PRETTIER” for a stupid lie, so she inserted the term “inversely proportional”, although she immediately began to talk About a STRAIGHT LINE! And I didn’t even understand the absurdity of what she wrote!

LANGUAGES, any languages, including the languages of animals and even insects, did NOT arise AS A MEANS OF COMMUNICATION!!!

And as A WAY of forming CONCEPTS for “internal use”. Any being, perceiving the phenomena of life with his senses, first (of course, UNCONSCIOUSLY) tries to turn FOR HIMSELF into certain CONCEPTS, names that carry a certain meaning FOR HIM. And only after that, when a being is physically among beings who are similar in anatomy, physiology, and general lifestyle, and because of this, similar CONCEPTS arise in their thinking, language acquires its second most important function – as a means of communication between similar beings.

Therefore, some vague statistical features found by this Zipf are inherent in ALL LANGUAGES, and there is nothing surprising in this!

This is also the reason for the different dialects of the same language – slightly different conditions of existence give rise to slightly different CONCEPTS, hence the dialect!

For, again: First, designations are formed in thinking for a multitude of phenomena perceived by the sensory organs of a being, and only then, when a being is found among his kind, WITH a SIMILAR SENSORY PERCEPTION, these formed concepts begin to be used to exchange SIMILAR information with other beings.

In my opinion, it is OBVIOUS to be neither a philologist, nor “linguist”!

(Exactly, “IN MY OPINION”) but not for pseudo-scientific idiots!)

4 I 2026