History
A landmark year in the history of the Czech Language Institute was 1891, which saw the establishment of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts, the country’s foremost research institution. Similarly to comparable institutions around the world, the Academy was charged with developing a large explanatory dictionary of the Czech national language. In 1906, František Pastrnek, leading lexicographers František Štěpán Kott and Josef Zubatý submitted a proposal to begin preparatory work on the dictionary. The Academy set up a Class III Commission to review the proposal. The Commission’s efforts culminated in the founding of the first academic department ‒ the Office of the Dictionary of the Czech Language – in 1911. The Office immediately started collecting lexical material for a Czech Language Handbook. In 1935, the Office began publishing the Handbook as a series of separate volumes, which was completed in 1957 with the final ninth volume.
After World War II, the Office was transformed into a research institute. It was charged with a broadened scope of tasks that included research on Czech dialects, the history of the Czech language and contemporary standard language. 1946 saw the founding of this new Czech Language Institute and the appointment of Alois Získal, the head of the former Office of the Dictionary, as its first director.
The Institute’s Brno office established a dialectology department in late 1952 and Václav Machek initiated the founding of an etymology department. After the establishment of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1952, the Czech Language Institute was incorporated into the new institution as one of its anchor institutes. Bohuslav Havránek, one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle, served as director of the Institute until 1965. He was succeeded by several prominent Czech linguists. Following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, František Daneš took the helm once again as director. Jiří Kraus assumed the role from 1994‒2002 and Karel Oliva headed the Institute from 2003-2016. Martin Prošek has been the director since 2016. Since 1992, the Czech Language Institute has been part of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), which was established as the Czech successor to the former Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
In 2011, the Czech Language Institute celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Office of the Dictionary of the Czech Language.
In 2023, the Institute obtained its own building: The Premises of the Czech Language Institute - Ústav pro jazyk český