Lexicostatistics

Lexicostatistics (also: Lexikometrie ) is the area of ​​language statistics that deals with statistical studies of the vocabulary of languages.

Lexicostatistics as part of the field of language statistics

The lexicostatistics is to be regarded as part of the field of language statistics, which, however, is concerned not only with the vocabulary, but also with all other areas of the language, eg with rank - frequencies of letters or sounds or the frequency of complex sentences in different text types. This distinction between lexicostatistics and language statistics is not sufficiently clear in some specialized dictionaries.

Topics of lexicostatistics

The lexicostatistics deals with all aspects of the vocabulary; from the research tradition can be, inter alia, the following topics cite: Creation of frequency dictionaries; Development of basic vocabulary; Growth of vocabulary in texts (token and type - relation); Relationship between the diversity, the richness of the vocabulary and the text length; Development strikingly frequent or rare words in texts; Distribution of words in texts; Scope and specifics of specialized vocabularies; Proportion of individual words in the total text ( text coverage); Investigation of the decay rates of the vocabulary of a language in time ( glottochronology ). If investigations into the vocabulary of the testing of laws of language change ( Piotrowski Act) or the language system and language use serve the lexicostatistics must also be understood as an integral part of Quantitative Linguistics.