EasyGeorgian publishes the first frequency list of spoken Georgian

EasyGeorgian has published the first open frequency list of spoken, colloquial Georgian, built from the dialogue of 68 films and 184,209 forum posts. The list covers 10,000 lemmas with English glosses, transliteration and per-register frequencies, and is free to use under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Every existing Georgian frequency list is built from written text, mostly news articles and encyclopedia entries, because that is the text that exists in bulk. The new corpus shows how badly that skews what learners are taught first. The word shemidzlia, meaning “I can”, ranks 30th in real speech but around 9,599th in the standard written ranking. Albat, meaning “probably”, shows the same pattern, while words like “electoral” and “municipality” sit in the written top 150.

The study also uncovered a stranger problem. The most widely circulated “Georgian” frequency list on the internet, embedded in countless flashcard decks and vocabulary apps, turns out to be the Bulgarian frequency list, corrupted into Georgian-looking characters by an encoding error. The team proved it by reversing the character substitution directly from the data.

“If your word list comes from newspapers, your first hundred words come from newspapers too,” says Lasse. “Spoken Georgian is about wanting, needing, probably and I can. We counted what people actually say, and we are giving the list away.”

The full study, methodology and downloads are at easygeorgian.com/spoken-georgian-frequency.

About EasyGeorgian

EasyGeorgian is a Georgian language learning platform operated by EasyGeorgian Development LLC, a company registered in Georgia and run from Tbilisi. It was founded by Lasse N., a Dane who moved to Tbilisi in 2021, and Tamar N., who is Georgian. The platform combines structured audio lessons, comprehensible input listening and spaced-repetition flashcards, and its courses are one-time purchases. More at easygeorgian.com.