Welcome to the LRC's Lessons & Lexicon

The Linguistics Research Center has dedicated itself to creating online resources for those interested in language, linguistic history, and the relationship between language and society over time.

If you would like to learn an early Indo-European language, please check out the Early Indo-European OnLine (EIEOL) collection of language lesson series. These lesson series introduce the earliest documented languages in each of the major branches of the Indo-European linguistic family tree. Each series places the language in its social and historical context, explains the major features of the language, and helps the user learn to read selections from original documents in each language. In order to get some ideas for how best to use the lessons, please consult the EIEOL User Guide.

Not every reader wishes to dive right into language learning. For those whose interests lie in tracing the origins of specific words in related languages, the LRC has developed the Indo-European Lexicon (IELEX). This amounts to a searchable dictionary of the roots, or etymological parents, of words from a wide swath of Indo-European languages. The IELEX is organized according to the roots, so that the user can start with the prehistoric parent word and find all words derived from that across the Indo-European languages. But as an aid to users, several different points of entry allow users to start their searches with a given Indo-European language, or with a general type of word they might find interesting. Please consult the IELEX User Guide for a quick introduction.

Feel free to head over to the LRC Home Page for a list of our other online resources. And please don’t hesitate to contact us with questions, comments, corrections, or concerns via the link to the left.