We are a non-profit educational corporation, transforming information into movement since 1987. We archive and publish the history & practice of folk dancing.

The Society of Folk Dance Historians (SFDH), a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational corporation founded in 1987, collects, preserves, and disseminates information about the history and practice of international folk dancing (IFD), a social movement that originated in approximately 1894 and continues to this day. This information not only preserves American cultural history, it occasionally contains the only surviving documentation of ethnic cultures that have vanished from their countries of origin, e.g., European Jewish, Rom (Gypsy), Western Armenian, the several Bosnian, Assyrian, and Kurdish cultures. The SFDH archives comprise one of the largest such collections in the world and the only such collection maintained on a daily basis by dance historians and for dance historians.

This Encyclopedia was compiled by Ron Houston and published by the Society of Folk Dance Historians.

• to allow folk dancers to make intellectual as well as physical leaps,
• to allow scholars to trace population movements by following the dance, and
• to give the discipline of international folk dancing a new, academic stage on which to perform.

No words or static pictures can teach you to dance, but this website can enhance your knowledge and enjoyment of the dances you already know.

Conventions and Disclaimers

Terms, titles, and names appear on this website in their most common forms and spellings, based on usage by the worldwide International Folk Dance (IFD) community. Less common forms and spellings appear when known, linked automatically to common forms and spellings. Knowledge of IFD usage comes from the editor's personal IFD experience begun in 1955 and from extensive research through the IFD literature. Because the strength of this electronic Encyclopedia lies in its ability to link automatically and rapidly a vast number of cross-references, no authority nor control of terms, titles, and names appears other than as noted. Non-standard orthographies (all those funny-looking letters) that appear in other languages are sometimes transliterated into their English-language, Roman-character equivalents as expressed in the 8-bit ISO Latin-1 character set (ISO 8859/1). Character equivalents were chosen by common usage rather than by international transliteration standards. Some computers may display some characters incorrectly. You may also want to change your browser font to see the right characters.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Many, many thanks to Professor Philip Doty, Ph.D., to the computer gurus, and to the rest of the faculty and staff of the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin for support and guidance in creating this website. Ron, however, is solely responsible for all opinions expressed.