Zipf's Law for Indian Languages

Abstract

The present paper attempts to study the application of Zipf's law for Indian languages. It examines the rank-frequency distribution in four Indian languages representing two Indo-Aryan and two Dravidian languages. The sample texts were drawn from five different genres viz., aesthetics, commerce, natural physical and professional sciences, official and media languages, and social sciences. The rank-frequency distributions were analysed for fitting the distribution by using Altmann Fitter software where it fitted the truncated zeta distribution defined as

where R is the truncation parameter and T is the normalizing constant. The analysis shows that rank-frequency distribution follows Zipf's law.