Abstract

Since the beginning of this century many complex systems have been studied by Complex Network Theory. Social, biological and technological systems have been viewed as networks were nodes represent system elements and edges represent the relationship between them. In this work we study languages from this perspective. Transforming texts in networks of words (i.e. finite strings of letters, symbols, or tokens) we observe that languages display common topological properties with other complex systems. Scaling in the distribution of word connectivity, properties of small-world networks, multifractal behaviour, among others properties, have been observed in networks extracted from texts written in Natural and Formal languages. We observe that many of these properties seem to depend on the frequency of words in the text, however other ones seem to be strictly determined by the grammar of language.