CEG Electronic Corpus of Welsh

(Corpws Electronig o’r Gymraeg)


This is a word frequency analysis of 1,079,032 words of written Welsh prose, based on 500 samples of approximately 2000 words each, selected from a representative range of text types to illustrate modern (mainly post 1970) Welsh prose writing.

It was conceived as providing a Welsh parallel to the Kucera and Francis analysis for American English, and the LOB corpus for British English, in the expectation that such an analysed corpus would provide research tools for a number of academic disciplines: psychology and psycholinguistics, child and second language acquisition, general linguistics, and the linguistics of Modern Welsh, including literary analysis.

The sample included materials from the fields of novels and short stories, religious writing, childrenís literature both factual and fiction, non-fiction materials in the fields of education, science, business, leisure activities, etc.,  public lectures, newspapers and magazines, both national and local, reminiscences, academic writing, and general administrative materials (letters, reports, minutes of meetings).

The resultant corpus was analysed to produce frequency counts of words both in their raw form and as counts of lemmas where each token is demutated and tagged to its root. This analysis also derives basic information concerning the frequencies of different word classes, inflections, mutations, and other grammatical features.

Articles based on the use of the database should cite: Ellis, N. C., O’Dochartaigh, C., Hicks, W., Morgan, M., & Laporte, N.  (2001). Cronfa Electroneg o Gymraeg (CEG): A 1 million word lexical database and frequency count for Welsh.