A corpus-based academic word list and terminology profile for intercultural communication

Abstract Responding to the growing recognition that academic vocabulary is discipline-sensitive, this study develops and validates an Intercultural Communication Academic Word List (ICAWL). Owing to the lexical complexity and interdisciplinary scope of IC scholarship, general academic word lists may not adequately capture its vocabulary demands. A purpose-built corpus of 1,000 Scopus-indexed IC research articles published from 2025 onwards (9,046,688 tokens) was compiled. Word selection followed a multi-stage procedure incorporating frequency, range, dispersion, lexical profiling, keyword analysis against the British National Corpus, concordance screening, lemmatisation, and expert judgement. Two independent validation corpora — research articles (826,031 tokens) and books (1,557,040 tokens) — were used to assess coverage. The final ICAWL comprises 556 lemmas (704 word types) and achieves approximately 16 per cent coverage across corpora, substantially exceeding the Academic Word List (6–7%). The findings confirm the discipline-specific nature of IC vocabulary and provide a principled resource for curriculum design and corpus-informed pedagogy.