  In this article, we investigate the properties of phoneme N-grams across half
of the world's languages. We investigate if the sizes of three different N-gram
distributions of the world's language families obey a power law. Further, the
N-gram distributions of language families parallel the sizes of the families,
which seem to obey a power law distribution. The correlation between N-gram
distributions and language family sizes improves with increasing values of N.
We applied statistical tests, originally given by physicists, to test the
hypothesis of power law fit to twelve different datasets. The study also raises
some new questions about the use of N-gram distributions in linguistic
research, which we answer by running a statistical test.
