Swedish Kelly-list

The Swedish Kelly-list is a freely available frequency-based vocabulary list that comprises general-purpose language of modern Swedish. The list has been generated from a large web-acquired corpus (SweWAC) of 114 mln. words dating from the 2010’s. It is adapted to the needs of language learners and contains 8 425 most frequent lemmas that cover 80% of SweWAC.

The way the Swedish Kelly-list is compiled, it is a reliable resource for suggesting lexical syllabus for CEFR-based courses in Swedish as well as for use in evaluating learner appropriate texts for different CEFR levels, for compiling course books, creating vocabulary exercises and tests, compiling dictionaries, and for a number of other language learning purposes and NLP applications. The list can be used by language learners and teachers, test creators, lexicographers, comparative linguists, corpus linguists, computational linguists, and many other user groups.

The headwords on the Swedish Kelly-list contain the following information, see also Table below:

  1. id/running number (i.e. relative placement in the frequency band);
  2. raw frequency (RF);
  3. relative frequency , i.e. “word-per-million” (WPM);
  4. CEFR level (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2);
  5. source of lemma (indication whether the headword comes from SweWAC, from translation list (T2) or has been manually added);
  6. grammar information, i.e. article or infinitive marker;
  7. lemma, sometimes provided together with its spelling/stylistic variant;
  8. word class;
  9. comments/examples for some of the headwords

Example of items in the Swedish Kelly-list
ID 88
Raw Freq 2624 032
Word per Million 23017,26
CEFR level A1
Source SweWaC
Grammar marker att
Item vara (vardagl. va)
POS verb
Example e.g. var så god!

The information should be read in the following way: the verb “att vara” (Eng. “to be, to last”) has a colloquial variant “va”; it can be used in a phrase “var så god!” (Eng. “here you go!”); it has the rank “88” in the list and thus belongs to the language’s top 100 words. It has been used 2 624 032 times in SweWAC (RF) which gives 23 017,26 wpm value. The item belongs to the most important vocabulary for language learners and should be learnt at A1 CEFR level (here marked as “1”).