The Geirfan wordlist: A Vocabulary list for adult learners of Welsh

The Geirfan wordlist is a curated list of 500 of the most frequent words in the Welsh language, designed for use by learners at A1/A2[1] levels of proficiency (Council of Europe, 2021). This vocabulary list was developed using an innovative symbiosis of corpus-based methods (using data from the CorCenCC corpus) and expert-led introspection and reflection; an approach which can be replicated and adapted for use in any other language context.

The lists are included in the appendices of the Geirfan document, comprising the following:

Appendix A contains the most frequent 750 words from CorCenCC, the result of tagging the corpus with CyTag2. This was the list that was curated by the project team, resulting in the basic 500-word wordlist (Appendix B). 

Appendix B contains the basic 500-word list, without additions. These 500 words are those which are directly drawn from CorCenCC’s frequency data.

Appendix C contains the working list of additions, as an alphabetical list. The 500-word basic list plus these additions is the initial batch of headwords for the dictionary on the Geirfan website.

Full details on how to interpret the lists are included in the main body of the documentation.