Quantitative Linguistics in Russia

Quantitative Linguistics (QL) is one of the frontier areas of linguistics research in big data era. During the formation and development of this discipline, Russia (Soviet Union) is one of the most important centers, which is little known to Chinese scholars. This paper presents the path of QL development in Russia, from early speech statistics to Soviet Union period and then the present stage. It reviews the main research fields and academic contributions from Russian scholars in QL. The study shows that Russian linguists played vital roles in different periods of worldwide QL development. The Russian scholars' academic thoughts and achievements can provide references on theory and approach for research on Chinese linguistics and literature.