1.Objectives of Establishment

To discuss in-depth the biological, mathematical and cultural commonality of human languages and to further establish scientific and systematic knowledge thereof, Academia Sinica has, oriented to the long-term development policy of "institutes for basic sciences and centers for inter-disciplinary research", established the Preparatory Office of Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica (ILAS) in 1997 and officially launched ILAS in 2004. Today, ILAS has 17 full-time research fellows and our mission is to engage in the scientific research of human languages. Over the years, we have been devoted to studying the structure and typology of Taiwan's native and neighboring languages; and to doing inter-disciplinary research. ILAS already achieved significant results in language structure analysis; simulation and calculations of computational linguistics; language archives; and inter-disciplinary research.

2.Research Directions

• Diverse Development and Vigorous Vitality

  Our research fields are diverse, covering the expertise of our research colleagues including phonetics, phonology, lexicology, syntax, semantics and historical languages linguistics. With their long-term cultivation in this basic theoretical linguistics, ILAS succeeded in building a firm foundation of Taiwan's linguistic research and providing rich corpuses for different languages. Besides, to fulfill ILAS' social responsibility, our research fellows have been proactive in surveying endangered and minority languages to rescue and archive languages. Our research target languages, on the other hand, also cover a wide geographical area and have rich and diverse contents.

• Inter-disciplinary Research and integration

  Apart from conducting a full range of basic linguistic research, ILAS also goes beyond the barriers of disciplines and attempts to combine knowledge outside of the circle to, through diverse research methods, conduct an inter-disciplinary integrated research. It is our aspiration to this new approach will solve more linguistic issues and facilitate inter-disciplinary research, such as neurolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus phonetics and computational linguistics.