This page lists software and tools that are not restricted to corpus and computational linguistics in terms of their functionality, but that are a prerequisite for many applications that will be encountered in this field. Examples are programming languages such as Java, Perl, Python and R as well as extensions to your operating system required by some software applications such as Tcl/Tk, GraphViz and others.

Java JDK for different OSs

Make sure you are downloading the correct Java version for your operating system. For example, there are versions for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Python has become a very popular programming language among linguists, corpus and computational linguists in recent years. This success is partly due to the fact that it is available for free as in free of charge, but a crucial factor has also been the added utility for natural language processing which has been brought to Python by Bird et al.'s
Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)
Python.org - The Python programming language

Learn some more about Python.

Another popular programming language that is widely used by linguists and also is a prerequisite for some processing steps as well as tools such as the tokenizer in the TreeTagger is called Perl.