Monitor Corpus of Irish

Corpas Monatóireachta na Gaeilge (CMG) contains one million words per year from the period 2000-2024. The million words per year were compiled from genres in which Irish language material was published every year during this period e.g. news, literature, and legislation. This translates into 24 million words in the current version of CMG. One million additional words will be added in 2025.

CMG enables us to identify and examine changes in the use and vocabulary of the language. It is possible, for example, to see in what year certain words were used for the first time such as ‘Breatimeacht’ (Brexit) and ‘podchraoladh’ (podcast). Alternatively, you can track the increase or decrease in the use of certain words and phrases over the period, e.g. ‘tithíocht’ (housing), ‘cúlú eacnamaíochta’ (recession). A timeline appears above the list of results indicating the frequency of the word or phrase from year to year since 2000.

CMG was generated from Corpas Náisiúnta na Gaeilge in the following manner:

• The number of words in CNG per year was calculated, counting a maximum of 2k words per document. Documents without an exact date were not included.
• Based on this number of words, the ratio by genre in CNG was worked out for the year, counting a maximum of 2k words per document. On average, 1,372 different documents were sampled per year.
• Based on that ratio, a maximum word count for CMG was calculated for each genre for the year, so that the total would add up to 1m words.
• The files for each genre were placed in a random order, and then genre by genre, between 100 and c.2k words were taken from the end of each file one by one, until the maximum word count for the genre was reached.
• This process was repeated for every year of the period.
• The years 2000-2024 (25 years/25m words) is included in the current version of CMG. NB: 2024 is based on data from Q1-2 only.