The Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database (IELex) is an initiative of the Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture research group to make available a database of cognate judgements in the Indo-European languages. The provenance of every lexeme and every cognate judgement in the database is recorded and available for review.
Please note: as of the 2nd of December, 2015 the database has been migrated to a new server, and no new data will be added to ielex.mpi.nl. An announcement of the public url will follow soon. GlottoBank coders: Please contact Cormac for instructions.
Data from this database was used in the following publications:
- Bouckaert, R., Lemey, P., Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Alekseyenko, A.
V., Drummond, A. J., Gray, R. D., Suchard, M. A., & Atkinson, Q. D. 2012.
‘Mapping the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language
family’. Science, 337 (6097), 957–960.
Downloads and links: article (Science site); lexical cognate data (nexus file); FAQ website.
- Dunn, M., Greenhill, S. J., Levinson, S. C., & Gray, R. D. 2011. ‘Evolved
structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order
universals’. Nature, 473, 79–82.
Downloads: article (Nature site); article (author preprint); lexical cognate data (nexus file).
We owe particular gratitude to the following sources:
- Isidore Dyen’s Comparative
Indo-European Database.
Dyen, Isidore, Joseph B. Kruskal, and Paul Black. 1992. ‘An Indoeuropean Classification: A Lexicostatistical Experiment’. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82 (5). 1–132.
The original cognate judgements are available [text]. These cognate judgements have been systematically reviewed and revised by members of the IELex project.
- The
Computational Phylogenetics in Historical Linguistics project.
Ringe, Don, Tandy Warnow, and Ann Taylor. 2002. ‘Indo-European and Computational Cladistics’. Transactions of the Philological Society 100 (1): 59–129.
The original wordlists are available to download as pdf.
The database contains:
| Languages | 163 |
| Meanings | 225 |
| Words | 34619 |
| Cognate Sets | 5013 |
| Coded Characters | 32651 |