Latent Core Tokenizer: Compress, but Meaningfully

Tokenizers are commonly optimized for compression, but a compact vocabulary does not necessarily distribute its capacity evenly across languages. We introduce the Latent Core Tokenizer (LCT), a language-agnostic approach that separates structural discovery from vocabulary construction. LCT uses Minimum Description Length, entropy-based boundary signals, and morphotactic constraints to identify reusable linguistic units before constructing a shared vocabulary. Across 104 languages with a 200K-token vocabulary, LCT achieves lower fertility and higher MorphScore than BPE, Unigram, and parity-aware BPE, while maintaining comparable cross-lingual disparity in tokenization cost. Across four multilingual downstream benchmarks, LCT improves aggregate score by 1.48, 1.83, and 2.00 points over BPE, Unigram, and parity-aware BPE, respectively. Our findings show that compression alone does not predict representation quality and highlight the importance of morphology-driven structural discovery and how frequency is used to allocate the final vocabulary across languages.