More information about Kelly is available from the project page.
Other Kelly languages
If you use any of the Kelly list, please, cite the following reference:
Kilgarriff, Adam; Charalabopoulou, Frieda; Gavrilidou, Maria; Johannessen, Janne Bondi; Khalil, Saussan; Kokkinakis, Sofie Johansson; Lew, Robert; Sharoff, Serge; Vadlapudi, Ravikiran & Volodina, Elena. 2014. Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages. Language Resources and Evaluation, 48:121–163, DOI 10.1007/s10579-013-9251-2.
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:
- id/running number (i.e. relative placement in the frequency band);
- raw frequency (RF);
- relative frequency , i.e. “word-per-million” (WPM);
- CEFR level (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2);
- source of lemma (indication whether the headword comes from SweWAC, from translation list (T2) or has been manually added);
- grammar information, i.e. article or infinitive marker;
- lemma, sometimes provided together with its spelling/stylistic variant;
- word class;
- 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”).
Available/downloadable Kelly-products
The Swedish Kelly-list is a freely available electronic resource and is distributed under the license agreement CC-BY-SA 3.0, LGPL 3.0. You are encouraged to make a reference to any of the articles describing this list if you use the Swedish Kelly-list.
- Human-friendly excel-file with the Swedish Kelly-list can be downloaded here.
- The machine-friendly version can be downloaded here.
As a side effect a number of other products have been created during the KELLY project, among other things:
- Kelly Database where a word in any of the partner languages can be entered and its translation into the other partner languages is presented, if the item is present in the database: https://kelly.sketchengine.co.uk/
- lists of universal vocabulary for 9, 8, 7 etc. languages, i.e. items that can be used multidirectionally as translation lexica (can be downloaded here soon)
- list of unique Swedish items, i.e. items never used by translators from other languages into Swedish
- lists of shared words between different language pairs
