Linguistic Complexity: Relationships Between Phoneme Inventory Size, Syllable Complexity, Word and Clause Length, and Population Size

Starting from a view on language as complex, hierarchically organized system composed of many parts that have interactions, this paper investigates statistical relationships between the linguistic variables “phoneme inventory size,” “syllable “length words,” clauses,” and nonlinguistic variable “population size.” By analyzing parallel textual material 61 languages (18 families) we found strong positive correlations phoneme size, mean number phonemes per syllable, monosyllables. We observed significant negative size length words clauses, measured syllables. then correlated complexity data with estimated speaker population sizes could reveal more speakers tend to shorter in syllables, higher monosyllabic words, clause. Moreover, reproduce results former studies correlation for our sample. The findings are discussed light previous research within framework Systemic Typology. propose syllable is key factor identified study, Zipf's law Abbreviation explains associations “word length,” complexity,” extralinguistic