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arXiv · 2603.02860

The Distribution of Phoneme Frequencies across the World's Languages: Macroscopic and Microscopic Information-Theoretic Models

Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín·Suchir Salhan
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Abstract

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-theoretic account of phoneme frequency structure.

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Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín, Suchir Salhan. 2026-03-03. The Distribution of Phoneme Frequencies across the World's Languages: Macroscopic and Microscopic Information-Theoretic Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02860

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