Integrating Trans-disciplinary Methods between Physics and Linguistics

Two centuries ago, Thomas Young was challenged by Champollion, a French linguist, to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. Young is also known as the namer of the Indo-European languages. The history of science shows, however, that until the middle of the last century, when, along with Shannon's information theory, the scale-free rank-frequency law of word occurrence in English texts was found by Zipf, there was no active interaction between physics and linguistics. Since the beginning of the present century, to explain the underlying mechanism of the law, efforts have been made by physicists rather than linguists. Taking advantage of this success, we are now in a position to pay attention not only to European languages but to other language systems all over the world, which might include, along with creolization phenomena between distinct languages, several complicated rules to be revealed by a statistical physics tool that has been developed to date for the analysis of complex systems.

This Research Topic aims to motivate scientists to explore deep interactions between physics and linguistics through discussions on the significance and applicability of methodologies based on physics. They include not only statistical approaches (both Bayesian and non-Bayesian) but also analytical tools using direct integration schemes by Feynman's path integral and the finite-difference time-domain method. We believe that, for our closely interdisciplinary area, a variety of information-theoretical tools will become more useful; examples are, besides the conventional Shannon's entropy, the generalized entropy by Renyi and Tsallis, as well as the distorted, multiscale, and transfer entropy. Contributions that are focused on the analysis of the rhyming patterns of verses are welcome as well, in which a novel analog to quantum correlation is expected to be found. In order to elucidate the rhyming scheme, a group-theoretical approach to crystallography might be useful.

Contributions range across the following research areas:
• Modelling and analysis of statistical rules or laws of languages and texts.
• Modification of the conventional equations for empirical laws of languages.
• Testing the universality of Zipf-like laws in non-European languages.
• Analysis of naming networks (global or regional; surnames or forenames).
• Modelling of phase transition and critical phenomena in the process of creolization.
• Evolutionary dynamics of scale-free complex networks in phonology.
• Sound correlations and phonological complexities in verses and poetry.
• Numerical simulation of dialectal spread, fake news, and cultural epidemic.

Keywords: rank-frequency rule, long tailed phenomena, long range correlations, phonological complexity, complexity in phonetics, complex network, statistical linguistics

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.