Rank-Frequency Analysis of Characters in Garhwali Text: Emergence of Zipf's Law

Abstract

Zipf's law is ubiquitous in a language system, which establishes a relation between rank and frequency of characters or words. In the present study, it is shown that the distribution of character frequencies for Garhwali language follows Zipf-Mandelbrot law. Garhwali language is an Indo-Aryan language, spoken in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand, India (northwestern Himalayan belt of India). The present communication examines the rank-frequency distribution by generalization of Zipf-Mandelbrot law in Garhwali language having limited dictionary size. The study shows that the distribution of character frequencies of consonants (with matras), vowels (including vowels with consonants in shape of matras) and all characters (including vowels and consonants without matras) for continuous Garhwali corpus follows Zipf-Mandelbrot law.