@inProceedings{rama-borin-2012-properties-164449, title = {Properties of phoneme N -grams across the world’s language families}, abstract = {In this article, we investigate the properties of phoneme N -grams across half of the world’s languages. The sizes of three different N -gram distributions of the world’s language families obey a power law. Further, the N -gram distributions of language families parallel the sizes of the families, which also follow a power law distribution. The correlation between N -gram distributions and language family sizes improves with increasing values of N . The study also raises some new questions about the use of N -gram distributions in linguistic research, which we hope to be able to investigate in the future.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC)}, author = {Rama, Taraka and Borin, Lars}, year = {2012}, }