Scaling relations for diversity of languages

The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer simulations of fragmentation dynamics where similar scalings appear. The language size distribution is also studied and shown to display two scaling regions: (i) one for the largest tin population) languages and (ii) another one for intermediate-size languages. It is then argued that these two classes of languages may have distinct growth dynamics, being distributed on the sets of different fractal dimensions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.