Intelligence Studies: Country Research and Language Resources

This site provides links to a variety of information related to American Indians and Alaska Natives.

"provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities."

Country Insights -- a Canadian website.

From Canada, you may only download and print materials for non-commercial, educational use.

The Library of Congress collects materials from all over the globe. its collections are the finest and most comprehensive research collections outside the country of origin. Start your search here for information on other countries.

Regional and Cultural Information

International Etiquette Guide - "Understanding other people's languages, cultures, etiquettes and taboos is of great value to the traveller or visiting business person."

"a compendium of online materials about more than 800 indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere and the people that speak them."

Free foreign language lessons, free audio books and podcasts in 37 different languages. Download lessons to your computer, MP3 player...

You can use this site to search and obtain histories of every civilization, empire and event that you are looking for.

Educational world atlas with visualized information about geography, history, demographics, and economy of world countries.

Electronic texts of Spanish and Latin American poetry from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. The poetry included is searchable by author or first line. There are both English and Spanish search interfaces for this site, but the text of the poems is available only in Spanish.

wonderful open-access repository of Spanish historical texts and literature of Spanish and Spanish American writers. Contains biographies, chronologies, complete works, translations, sound recordings, interviews, filmographies, dictionary, images, and more. Officially launched in 1999, number of available works has reached over 22,000. It contains all the works of Cervantes including various historical versions.

This site features full-text Spanish and English editions of works, criticism, graphics, and bibliographies on Spanish Golden Age comedias. The site also offers access to the association's listserv, which features academic discussions on Spanish comedias.

"This website allows you to quickly and easily search more than 100 million words in more than 20,000 Spanish texts from the 1200s to the 1900s."

Choose your country and find resources selected by Library of Congress's subject experts.

Free Spanish electronic books in the public domain.

Spanish Language grammar exercises.

Free Spanish Tutorials.

Free access to the full text of public domain works of close to 100 French authors, fully searchable by author, title or keyword.

News and culture information about francophones in African countries.

Their "mission in the United States is to encourage and develop knowledge of the French language and French and Francophone cultures, and to foster cultural, intellectual and artistic exchanges between the USA and France and the French-speaking countries".

More than 2000 e-texts in French on philosophy, science, classics, literature, history, economics.

Available in French & English, this website provides the searchable catalog for the French National Library. Internal links include Cultural Events, the Library, Collections, the Digital Library, Practical Information, the BnF Catalogues Services and Virtual Exhibitions.

Portal to french culture information...in french.

Official website of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

The official digitization project of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Gallica comprises full-text, images and recordings. Especially rich in 19th century materials, the database includes material as far back as the middle ages. Gallica's "Dossiers" are particularly useful collections of documents in specific areas.

Links to french cinema...

The French Cultural Ministry web site

Travel and tourism site...includes maps.

The French Government website.

Resources Selected by the Library of Congress's subject experts.

Digital archive of classic Italian literature.

Comprehensive website covering all aspects of Italian cinema since 2000, including films, actors, trailers, soundtracks, festivals, industry news, etc.

Resources for the study of the Italian language, literature written in Italian, and the history and culture of Italy.

"Italian Studies Online is a project of humanities computing. Addresses specifically the Italian studies on the net, not of Italian outright."

Online magazine dedicated to modern Italian life and culture.

Official website of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities

Resources selected by the Library of Congress subject experts.

Historical dictionary of the Italian language.

A directory of Italian literature by a development team
in the U.California, Santa Barbara, English Department.

This site contains Classical Latin and Greek texts, as well as Medieval Latin texts.

Princeton's site containing examples of Greek and Latin prose and poetry text.

Free, high quality educational resources by the AbleOne Education Network Corporation.

"CSL) is a collaborative project among scholars from a variety of disciplines with the main purpose of creating a digital library of Latin literature, spanning from the earliest epigraphic remains to the Neo-Latinists of the eighteenth century. Toward this end, we maintain an up-to-date catalogue of all Latin texts that are currently available online, making CSL a single, centralized resource for locating Latin literature on the internet."

Just for fun...try out these word games based on Roman culture and the Latin language.

12 Lessons to understand basic latin

The texts are presented merely for ease of on–line reading or for downloading for personal or educational use.

Omniglot is an encyclopedia of writing systems and languages.

"A free online learning resource that provides downloadable Greek and Latin grammars and readers. They also provide an extensive and ever growing collection of classical e-books in English, Greek and Latin. "

From the University of California-Santa Barbara, "VoS emphasizes both primary and secondary (or theoretical) resources, and defines its audience as people who have something to learn from a higher-education, professional approach to the humanities."

This site lists over 1,800 Latin phrases, mottoes, and quotations along with their English translations. Searchable. From Yuni Words of Wisdom, a Web site focusing on inspirational quotations.

"is developed and maintained by a team of professionals with the aim of making directory more informative and useful to general internet users around the world. Experienced editors at 1 Webs Directory lists only informative and resourceful websites under appropriate categories and sub categories to make it more informative and useful. "

University of Exeter's directory of the Arab World.

"Here you'll find some useful resources to help you to understand the Arabic Language better."

Information for the study of Islam, Qur'an, hadith, the Sunnah, Shi'ism and Heterodox Movements Sufism and Sufi Poetry Islam in the modern world, militant Islam, jihad, Islamist or extremist Muslims, and terrorism, Islam in Iraq, Muslim women, Islamic art, architecture, music, as well as Islamic history, theology, philosophy, and Arabic and other Islamic languages such as Persian, and religion in general.

Arab Literature Collection collected by Cornell University.

From the University of Chicago, "The Middle East History and Theory Workshop serves as a multidisciplinary platform where University students and faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences can discuss a wide array of academic questions related to the history, societies, culture, and politics of the Middle East."

Select the country. These resources have been selected by the Library of Congress's subject experts.

"The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc. (CJKI ) maintains CJK and Arabic lexical databases of 24 million entries. We play a leading role in helping the IT industry penetrate the lucrative East Asian market by providing software developers with high quality comprehensive dictionary data and consulting services."

Facts, key phrases and the Russian alphabet.

"is a full-text digital resource. FEB-web accumulates information in text, audio, visual, and other forms on 11th-20th-century Russian literature, Russian folklore, and the history of Russian literary scholarship and folklore studies."

Resources Selected by the Library of Congress's subject experts.

An extensive collection of Russian literature, in Russian for the most part, with some English translations.

Designed by Hunter College as a useful tool for scholars and students. Includes a section on Russifying Your Computer.

A collection of Russian literature, for the purpose of studying and improving knowledge of the Russian language.

Duke's Slavic and East European Language Research Center directory of resources. Well-maintained and annotated outline Web sites covering all aspects of Slavic and East European countries. Select Russia from the menu of countries, or another former republic of the Soviet Union. For statistics, scroll down to Country Analyses.

Calls itself the "World's Best Russian Literature Website"

Omniglot is an encyclopedia of writing systems and languages.

Resources selected by the Library of Congress Subject experts.

"TELL is a database of 30,000 Turkish words representing both print dictionaries and the actual knowledge of two native speakers."

Geography, resources, economy, climate, government, etc.

"Turkish Culture is unique in the world in that it has influenced and has been influenced in return by cultures and civilizations from China to Vienna and from Russian steps to North Africa for over a millennia."

Free online Turkish language lessons.

Turkish Language and Culture links by UCLA's teaching resources for less commonly taught languages.

Website of the museum devoted to documenting and displaying the Ainu, an ethnic group of Japan. features essays with images from the collections, about the history, life styles, music, sacred dances, and oral literature, etc. of the Ainu.

From Harvard, this resource "supports research on Japan and provides a forum for related academic activities and the exchange of ideas".

Japanese Institutional Repositories Online

From NYU... a number of links to sources of statistical and policy information to assist your work.

A searchable site for Japanese Government information.

A collection of links to a variety of sites.

Compiled by the Japan Foundation, the database covers Japanese literary works translated into other languages mainly from the end of World War II to the present and is searchable by author, title of work, translator, or other keywords (terms may be input in either Japanese or roman letters). The basic unit of the database is the work rather than the publication, so short stories are listed individually by their own titles rather than in the anthology in which they were originally included.

From Duke University - an annotated list of links to full-text resources.

An encyclopedia of writing systems and languages.

"PAIR offers scholars, students and the interested public more than six thousand professionally selected, cataloged and annotated online resources within 25 different subtopic areas." From a project run by University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota and the Ohio State University.

Resources selected by the Library of Congress subject experts.

From MIT, "the VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto largely inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China."

"798 stands for much more than a three digit number: in Beijing these numbers symbolize the country's cutting edge art movement led by the Chinese vanguard, unchained artistic personalities with alternative life goals."

Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks at The Ohio State University has annotated links to over six hundred China- and Chinese language and linguistics-related websites.

Comparative tables created by the Warring States Project, to help you navigate between Wade-Giles, Pinyin and Common Alphabet romanization.

This site contains Chinese classics with each character hyperlinked to its definition and etymology. No Chinese software is necessary - characters are displayed as images. Links to English translations are included for most works. Maintained by a professor of Indiana University.

8,500+ links to China/Chinese related Web sites.

Literature Awards sponsored by the Chinese Writers Association.

"This resource center contains, among other things, bibliographies of mostly English-language materials on modern Chinese literature, film, art, and culture and is maintained by Kirk A. Denton at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Ohio State University."

Holdings of a collection at United College Library, Chinese University of Hong Kong: modern plays of the 1930s & 1940s; translations of Western plays; works on the theory & practice of drama; periodicals (text in Chinese)

Resources selected by the Library of Congress Subject Experts.