Introduction to Python Programming for Linguists and NLP

Language is full of patterns, but analyzing text manually limits what you can discover. This text-based course bridges the gap between linguistics and computer science, introducing you to the power of programming for language analysis. You will transition from a complete beginner to a confident script writer, learning how to clean, parse, and analyze textual data using Python. In this course, you will: Learn foundational Python syntax, variables, and data structures with a focus on string manipulation; Understand core computational linguistics concepts, including tokenization, stemming, and parts-of-speech tagging; Apply regular expressions to search, match, and extract complex patterns from raw text; Write clean, modern Python code using type hints to ensure your scripts are reliable; Analyze word frequencies, concordances, and lexical diversity metrics to uncover textual patterns; Configure simple text-processing pipelines to automate repetitive language analysis tasks. We begin with essential coding terminology and basic logic before moving step-by-step into practical text-processing concepts. This course is designed specifically for students of philology, linguistics, and the humanities who have no prior programming experience. Start your journey into computational linguistics and unlock the power of text data.