I would expect that for any sampling of data that has a roughly similar distribution over many scales.

Which will be true of many human curated corpuses. But it will also be similar to, for natural data as well. Such as the lengths of random rivers, or the brightness of random stars.

The law was first discovered because logarithm books tended to wear out at the front first. That turned out to because most numbers had a small leading digit, and therefore the pages at the front were being looked up more often.