A corpus-based list of frequently used words in Sesotho

This article describes the development of a list of frequently used words in written Sesotho. The list has been created with the aim of incorporating it into frequency-based text readability metrics. The list was derived using a corpus-based approach. By leveraging three existing Sesotho corpora, frequency lists could be derived, which were subsequently merged and qualitatively analysed and fine-tuned by an experienced speaker of Sesotho. The main challenges in compiling the list included reconciling the spelling variations, the treatment of abbreviations, and the presence of unexpected words in the preliminary lists. The final list comprises 3037 entries and is made publicly available to the research community.