Modelling the Diachronic Emergence of Phoneme Frequency Distributions

ArXi:2603.09503v1 Announce Type: new Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the distribution. The origin of these patterns remains largely unexplained. In this paper, we investigate whether they can arise as consequences of the historical processes that shape phonological systems. We