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,
* search automatically for cognates across 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, or
check, which PAPERS_ so far have been written with help of LingPy.  You can also have a look at our
little TUTORIAL_ at this page, or search and download examples in our COOKBOOK_.  If you have
professional questions regarding cogind aspects of LingPy, you might want to have a look at our
REFERENCE_, or our REPOSITORY_ at GitHub_. For more
information about Python, see http://www.python.org for details.

How to cite LingPy?
-------------------

If you are using LingPy, please cite the library as follows:

  |quoteas|
  
  .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/5137/lingpy/lingpy.svg
     :target: https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/5137/lingpy/lingpy
  
  .. image:: https://img.shields.io/badge/PyPi_Package-2.4-brightgreen.svg
     :target: https://badge.fury.io/py/lingpy/
  
  .. image:: https://img.shields.io/badge/BibTex-List2018i-deb887.svg
     :target: http://bibliography.lingpy.org/evobib/raw.php?key=List2017i
  
  .. image:: https://img.shields.io/badge/GitHub-lingpy-000000.svg
     :target: https://github.com/lingpy/lingpy


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

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1

   examples
   tutorial/index
   docu/index
   reference
   download

.. _README: https://github.com/lingpy/lingpy/blob/master/README.md
.. _PAPERS: https://github.com/lingpy/lingpy/blob/master/PAPERS.md
.. _REPOSITORY: https://github.com/lingpy/lingpy/
.. _TUTORIAL: tutorial.html
.. _REFERENCE: reference.html
.. _COOKBOOK: https://github.com/lingpy/cookbook
.. _GitHub: https://github.com