At the moment this story has 2 upvotes in a half hour and is in the 8th position on the front page. Apparently HN has a fairy godmother algorithm that randomly promotes posts.

I tried to build a similar list myself for German and it's not easy as just taking a lot of content and counting frequency. I also haven't found existing curated lists of most useful vocabulary.

There are some databases but e.g. they are biased towards Wikipedia and web which makes some very obscure words at the top of popularity (like some technical words which are present on each wiki page like Datenschutz or Impressum).

> The “Social-Communicative” level barely changed in size. But nearly a quarter of the words in the 1953 list are gone, and 39% of the 2023 words are new. Humble, loyalty, fellowship, generous, polite, and companionship gave way to community, identity, organization, ethnic, gender, and narrative. ...It offers fewer words for the people directly around you, but more for belonging at a distance.

I would blame inequality on this one. In a more unequal world tribalization is a survival strategy and language follows.

When you see everybody else as your equals then focusing on describing that individual person, instead of their group, makes more sense.

Economic inequality affects deeply how we think about others.

Why keen?

Point your Duck at "VOA Special English"