Discovering Global Patterns in Linguistic Networks through Spectral Analysis: A Case Study of the Consonant Inventories

and the socio-cognitive phenomena associated with it can be aptly modeled and
visualized through networks of linguistic entities. However, most of the existing works on linguistic networks focus only on the local properties of the networks. This study is an attempt to analyze the structure of languages via a purely structural technique, namely spectral analysis, which is ideally suited for discovering the global correlations in a network. Application of this technique to PhoNet, the co-occurrence network of consonants, not
only reveals several natural linguistic principles governing the structure of the consonant
inventories, but is also able to quantify their relative importance. We believe that this powerful technique can be successfully applied, in general, to study the structure of natural languages.