.. -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Introduction
============


What is LingPy?
---------------

LingPy is a suite of open-source Python modules for sequence comparison,
distance analyses, data operations and visualization methods in quantitative
historical linguistics.

The main idea of LingPy is to provide a software package which, on
the one hand, integrates different methods for data analysis in quantitative
historical linguistics within a single framework, and, on the other hand,
serves as an interface for the preparation and analysis of linguistic data
using biological software packages.

What can be done with LingPy?
-----------------------------

With the help of LingPy, users can:

* tokenize and analyze IPA-encoded sequences, 
* carry out pairwise and multiple alignment analyses,
* conduct automatic cognate judgments for multiple languages, 
* calculate lexicostatistic distances between languages, 
* reconstruct language phylogenies using basic cluster algorithms, and
* export the results of these analyses to various formats which can be either
  used as input for external programs, or to visualize the results. 

How can LingPy be used?
-----------------------

LingPy is a library written in the Python programming language. It can be used
directly in the Python interpreter or imported into Python scripts. See the LingPy 
README_ file for instructions. For more information about Python, see 
http://www.python.org for details.

What's next?
-------------------------

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1

   examples
   tutorial/index
   docu/index
   download

.. _README: link2readmefile
