Identifying High-Frequency Words in Khmer Texts: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis

Reading, listening, speaking, and writing skills are essential in human communication. Learners or teachers who do not understand the high-frequency words which are the foundation for understanding the four skills are more likely to spend much time and less likely to get good results. Therefore, high-frequency words play an essential role in helping learners achieve their goals and in helping curriculum designers or developers create applications that are easily accessible to the public. This study aims at identifying the high-frequency words in the standard of NormFreq in Khmer text 40 times per 1 million words analyzed from texts from Koh Santepheap newspapers, Let’s Read! (developed by the Asia Foundation), books on a collection of Khmer/Cambodian folktales, a set of Khmer wisdom books, and books on Khmer literature at the high school level. AntConc is a corpus linguistics program used to analyze high-frequency words, and the Khmer dictionary 2022 is used to classify the parts of speech of the most frequent words, drawn from the standard of NormFreq 40 times per 1 million words. As a result, this study identified a list of 1,974 high-frequency words, with nouns being the most commonly part of speech, comprising 1,008 words. These research findings may assist teachers, curriculum developers, NGOs, or relevant partners in considering high-frequency words and nouns when preparing reading texts or materials for basic or elementary levels.