A preliminary study of Croatian language syllable networks

This paper presents preliminary results of Croatian syllable networks analysis. We analyzed networks of syllables generated from texts collected from the Croatian Wikipedia and Blogs. Different syllable networks are constructed in a way that each node in this network is a syllable, and links are established between two syllables if they appear together in the same word (co-occurrence network) or if they appear as neighbours in a word (neighbour network). As a main tool we use network analysis methods which provide mechanisms that can reveal new patterns in a complex language structure. We aim to show that syllable networks differ from Erdös-Renyi random networks, which may indicate that language has its own rules and self-organization structure. Furthermore, our results have been compared with other studies on syllable network of Portuguese and Chinese. The results indicate that Croatian Syllables networks exhibit certain properties of a small world networks.