Constructing a Norwegian Academic Wordlist

Constructing a Norwegian Academic Wordlist Kristin Hagen, Janne Bondi Johannessen and Arash Saidi Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo Pb. 1102 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway E-mail: kristiha@iln.uio.no, jannebj@iln.uio.no, garash84@gmail.com Abstract We present the development of a Norwegian Academic Wordlist (AKA list) for the Norwegian Bokmål variety. To identify specific academic vocabulary we developed a 100-million-word academic corpus based on the University of Oslo archive of digital publications. Other corpora were used for testing and developing general word lists. We tried two different methods, those of Carlund et al. (2012) and Gardner & Davies (2013), and compared them. The resulting list is presented on a web site, where the words can be inspected in different ways, and freely downloaded. Keywords: Norwegian, academic wordlist, method, academic corpus 1. Introduction This paper presents the development of a Norwegian Academic Wordlist (AKA list) for the Norwegian Bokmål variety (for historical reasons, Norwegian has two written varieties, the other is called Nynorsk). Academic vocabulary is vocabulary that is more frequent in academic texts than in general texts. The individual words should be well represented in many kinds of academic genres, to avoid including subject-specific terminology. A brief description of academic vocabulary and why it is needed can found in Section 2. To identify specific academic vocabulary we developed a 100-million-word academic corpus based on the University of Oslo archive of digital publications, described in Section 3. Other corpora were used for testing and for developing general word lists. We tried two different methods, those of Carlund et al. (2012) and Gardner & Davies (2013), Section 4. In Section 5, the lists are compared measuring coverage in two different test corpora. The resulting list is presented on a web site, where the words can be inspected in different ways, and freely downloaded (Section 6). The paper is concluded in Section 7. 2. Academic Vocabulary and the Need for a Norwegian AKA List According to Gardner & Davies (2013:8), academic core words are “those that appear in the vast majority of the various academic disciplines”, in contrast to general high-frequency words “that appear with roughly equal and high frequency across all major registers of the larger corpus, including the academic register” and in contrast to academic, technical words “that appear in a narrow range of academic disciplines”. Second language students and native students not used to academic language in their home and local environment face a challenge when meeting academia and its language. Unfortunately for such students in Norway, the nature of the Norwegian academic language has not been properly explored. The situation is different for English: The first academic vocabulary lists were published in the 1970s (see references in Gardner & Davies 2013), the first representative, academic word list was published thirty years later (Coxhead 2000), and the latest approach was presented by Gardner & Davies in 2013. We wanted to create a list of those academic words that people need to know independently of genre if they want to take full advantage …

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