Linguistic indicators

The quality of life of a society can be considered a function of its complexity which in turn can be indicated by the complexity of its language. Moreover, it is well known that a characterization of a language or of a particular author can be measured statistically. With this in view, this paper surveys and compares a class of linguistic indicators which characterizes languages and authors, presents a uniform review of Zipf's law including extensions and explanations, and presents a new rank-frequency approach which is useful as a linguistic indicator.