Authors: Johann-Mattis List (CRLAO, Paris) and Robert Forkel (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

Collaborators: Steven Moran (Universität Zürich, Peter Bouda, Johannes Dellert (University of Tübingen), Taraka Rama (Centre for Language Technology, Göteborg), Simon Greenhill (Australian National University, Canberra.

LingPy is a Python Library for Historical Linguistics. It is being developed for Python 2.7 and Python 3.x using a single codebase.

• All source code is available at: https://github.com/lingpy/lingpy.
• Documentation can be found at: http://lingpy.org.
• For a list of papers in which LingPy was applied, see here.

If you want to regularly install LingPy on your system, open a terminal and type in the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/lingpy/lingpy/
$ cd lingpy
$ python setup.py install

In order to use the library, start an interactive python session and import LingPy as follows:

>>> from lingpy import *

To install LingPy to hack on it, fork the repository, open a terminal and type:

$ git clone https://github.com/<your-github-user>/lingpy/
$ cd lingpy
$ python setup.py develop

This will install LingPy in "develpment mode", i.e. you will be able edit the sources in the cloned repository and import the altered code just as the regular python package.

We're currently working on a new release of LingPy which will be pushed to PyPi and also be installable via PIP, etc. The current LingPy on Github is rather stable and much more advanced than older versions, also supporting cross-platforms and both Python versions. If you run into any problems with installing LingPy for the moment, please make sure that you followed our quick installation instructions above and did not use any of the outdated releases. We might publish an official intermediate release in order to make sure that the well-known installation errors when installing LingPy in older versions via PIP do not occur, but for the moment, please download the current state of LingPy from github and manually install.