True reason for Zipfʹs law in language

Analysis of word frequency have historically used data that included English, French, or other language, data typically described by Zipfʹs law. Using data on traditional and modern Chinese literatures, we show here that Chinese character frequency stroked Zipfʹs law based on literature before Qin dynasty; however, it departed from Zipfʹs law based on literature after Qin dynasty. Combined with data about English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries, we show that the true reason for Zipfʹs Law in language is that growth and preferential selection mechanism of word or character in given language.