Cog: Language Comparison Software
About
Cog is an innovative tool designed for comparing languages using advanced lexicostatistics and comparative linguistics techniques. Whether you’re working on language documentation, historical linguistics, or dialectology, Cog can streamline and automate much of the word list comparison process, saving you valuable time and effort.
With Cog, you can experiment with different techniques for language variety comparison in an iterative manner. Run your comparisons, analyze the results, refine your methods, and run them again to consistently improve your assessments. Although it currently supports a limited number of comparison techniques, we aim to expand its capabilities in the near future.
Experiment Efficiently
Cog provides a robust framework for experimenting with language comparison techniques. Tailor each step of the process to meet your specific needs. With features such as IPA-based segmentation, syllabification, and stem identification, you can quickly produce reliable results.
Analyze quickly
Cog allows you to quickly produce results by automating many of the steps of the word list comparison process:
- IPA-based segmentation: automatically splits words in to segments
- Syllabification: automatically marks syllables
- Stem identification: identifies prefixes and suffixes so that they can be ignored during comparison
- Word alignment: aligns segments between word pairs
- Sound correspondence identification: automatically identifies sound correspondences and the environments in which they occur
- Likely cognate identification: provides various methods for identifying likely cognates
- Lexical/phonetic similarity: calculates lexical/phonetic similarity for multiple language varieties
Visualize
Cog offers multiple ways to visualize your comparison results. Generate radial trees, dendrograms, network graphs, similarity matrices, and geographical maps—all automatically. These visual tools help you interpret and present your data effectively.
Downloads
System Requirements
Cog is currently only available on Windows.
Cog requires that the .NET Framework is installed. Remember to install all of the latest updates for the .NET Framework to ensure that Cog runs properly.
License
Releases
| Cog 1.3.8 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.7 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.6 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.5 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.4 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.3 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.2 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.1 | for Windows 7 and later | |
| Cog 1.3.0 | for Windows Vista and later |
Support
The Cog Tutorial can help to get you started.
The Settings Reference provides more detailed information about the settings and techniques available in Cog.
Cog also includes help in the application, just hit the F1 key.
Contact
If you would like to report a problem or to request a new feature, you can create an issue in Cog’s issue tracker.
You can also send an email via the contact form below.