We present an analysis of communications for a large fragment of the pi-calculus based on Abstract Interpretation. For this purpose we introduce a new small-step operational semantics of the pi-calculus which expresses locality of processes and sharing between names without using a term algebra. In this semantics a process is encoded by the sequence of replication unfoldings that created it. The communication channels are described by an equivalence relation over a free monoid. The analysis relies on a numerical approximation of this relation via Parikh mappings. This allows us to infer automatically accurate descriptions of infinitely growing distributions of processes.