Keeleliste

Keeleliste is a collaborative, open lexical resource designed to serve as a portable baseline of core vocabulary across languages for research and pedagogy. It compiles curated word lists covering common semantic domains such as basic nouns, pronouns, numerals, colors, and everyday verbs, with translations across multiple languages. Each item includes a lemma, transcription, part of speech, gloss, example sentence, and metadata such as language family, frequency proxy, and source notes. The project emphasizes cross-linguistic comparability and is designed to support linguistic typology, second-language acquisition, and natural language processing tasks.

Keeleliste originated in the early 2010s as an international collaboration among linguists and educational technologists seeking standardized core vocabulary. It expands through community contributions, with governance and versioning to ensure quality control. The database is structured to allow interlanguage linkage, enabling researchers to map items between languages and to compare cognate sets.

Access and formats: Keeleliste is distributed under open licenses and is accessible via a public web interface as well as downloadable data in JSON, CSV, and RDF formats. An API allows programmatic queries for lexical data, frequency estimates, and example usages. The project supports localization and includes language packs for dozens of languages, with ongoing coverage expansion.

Usage: It is used for cross-language comparisons, curriculum design, vocabulary assessment, and training data for computational models such as machine translation and bilingual lexicon induction. Related concepts include Swadesh lists, basic vocabulary inventories, and lexical frequency lists.

See also: Swadesh list, basic vocabulary inventories, word frequency lists.