John Mansfield

In every language, the most frequent word occurs twice as often as the 2nd-most-frequent word, and that occurs twice as often as the 3rd-most-frequent word, and so on. This pattern is called Zipf’s Law, and because it applies to every natural language, scholars can even use it on undeciphered texts to determine whether the writing system is a real language. This is how we know that the mysterious Voynich manuscript, for example, likely contains a real language. Constructed languages often deviate from Zipf’s Law. Linguists are still uncertain why Zipf’s Law holds, however. The most prevalent idea is that it helps us be as efficient as possible in our communication.