Our take: This post compares the “essential vocabulary” lists called the General Service List (1953) and the New General Service List (2013, revised in 2023). The lists were designed as teaching tools for people learning English as a second language, built from real-world usage data and extensively tested. This post does computational text analysis on these two corpora, including semantic analysis, to demonstrate what the changes between these two lists reveal about changes to everyday life in America. She argues that the most significant change was a move away from concrete words. The shifts reflect a life that moved further from its own making: less tied to tools, animals, food, and the body; more tied to national or global institutions, categories, systems, and ideas. Interestingly, the number of adverbs on the list nearly doubled, highlighting a need for more specificity around abstract language.
Editors’ Choice: How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed
