Self-organization of the Sound Inventories: Analysis and Synthesis of   the Occurrence and Co-occurrence Networks of Consonants
  The sound inventories of the world's languages self-organize themselves giving rise to similar cross-linguistic patterns. In this work we attempt to capture this phenomenon of self-organization, which shapes the structure of the consonant inventories, through a complex network approach. For this purpose we define the occurrence and co-occurrence networks of consonants and systematically study some of their important topological properties. A crucial observation is that the occurrence as well as the co-occurrence of consonants across languages follow a power law distribution. This property is arguably a consequence of the principle of preferential attachment. In order to support this argument we propose a synthesis model which reproduces the degree distribution for the networks to a close approximation. We further observe that the co-occurrence network of consonants show a high degree of clustering and subsequently refine our synthesis model in order to incorporate this property. Finally, we discuss how preferential attachment manifests itself through the evolutionary nature of language. 
Animesh Mukherjee, Monojit Choudhury, Anupam Basu, and Niloy Ganguly