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I'm having difficulty finding a good frequency list for the Italian language (lemmas, not including inflected word forms). Anyone know if there's some research or website or institute where I could find a somewhat authoritative one? Thanks

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  • You need to be more specific. What do you consider a "word": Lemmata, i.e. underlying dictionary forms, or each inflected form counted separately, like ragazzo and ragazzi being two distinct words? Do you also want to include function words, like la or di? And last but not least, the frequency of a word will depend on its context of usage: A law code will contain different words than colloquial speech. Also, how many words should your list contain, and which format should the frequency be given in (an absolute number of occurences in certain text, a relative percentage, ...)? Jul 2, 2016 at 14:25
  • I'm looking for a frequency list to study, so it should not include inflected or conjugated forms, just infinitives and one form for words with gender. The problem is a lot of list are not like this and manually converting would be a huge pain.
    – user9324
    Jul 2, 2016 at 19:54
  • This information helps. I could try to automatically make such a list from a corpus, if I find a good corpus for Italian (most of such resources are newspaper articles, would that be okay?) and if I know a little more about the required contents and format. What about function vs. lexical words? How long should the list be? What about the format of the frequencies? I can't promise yet that I will find something appropriate, but I can try to if you give me some more information. However, the list that @Jeremy Needle linked looks quite good already. Jul 2, 2016 at 20:21
  • Hi Lemontree, the list below is unusable for study, so if you could make one that would be great! I'm looking for a list that I can systematically study to build vocabulary, I'm thinking around 3000 most common words with just one entry for each verb (no conjugated or any other forms) and also one entry for each adjective and noun (no plurals, gender derived forms). Newspaper articles or anything is great. I have no specific format required, just human readable, Thanks!
    – user9324
    Jul 3, 2016 at 8:47
  • The library I was hoping to make the task very easy unfortunately doesn't have a corpus for Italian included; I found a set of annotated corpora that would also legally be useable for non-commercial use here but I'd have to put some work in figuring out how to properly process the data format which I probably won't have the time for, I'm sorry. Jul 3, 2016 at 21:31

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For many languages, SUBTLEX is considered a good source for realistic frequencies. There is an Italian version, SUBTLEX-IT, available at http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-it/; (Crepaldi, Keuleers, Mandera, & Brysbaert, 2013).

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  • Thank you, unfortunately this list is not useful for study is it has separate entries for all conjugations, etc. I'm looking for a list that's ready for vocabulary study. I appreciate your response though.
    – user9324
    Jul 3, 2016 at 8:43
  • Ah, it's good that lemontree asked about lemma vs. wordform then. You should alter the question to reflect this new requirement. Note that you can convert from wordform stats to lemma stats (but not the reverse) with a little effort. Jul 3, 2016 at 12:51
  • Thanks for Jeremy Needle's recommendation. My Google search seems to confirm that Dr. Crepaldi et al's SUBTLEX-IT is widely used. To user9324: As lemontree suggested, you just need to view the columns of lemma and lemma frequency. I just posted the steps you need to do. For your convenience, I temporarily posted the result to yong321.freeshell.org/liw/subtlex-it-lemma-sorted.txt
    – yong321
    Jul 13, 2022 at 16:24
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Frequency lists extracted from the WaCky corpora. Lists of words and lemmas are provided, sorted by frequency.

itWaC (Italian) itWaC: a 2 billion word corpus constructed from the Web limiting the crawl to the .it domain and using medium-frequency words from the Repubblica corpus and basic Italian vocabulary lists as seeds.

http://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/doku.php?id=frequency_lists

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