  Some of the progress in determining the phase boundaries of the nuclear phase
diagram, the location of the critical point of the nuclear fragmentation phase
transition, and the values of the critical exponents of this transition is
reviewed. The recently postulated connection of the size of the largest
fragments as a function of their rank with Zipf's law known from linguistics is
discussed, and an exact formula is derived. We show that Zipf's law is not
strictly observed in nuclear fragmentation, but that one can derive useful
approximations.
