Goals and mission

The Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IJP PAN) conducts scholarly activities aimed at describing and documenting Polish language as used today and in the earlier centuries. The flagship projects of IJP PAN include scholarly dictionaries of the Polish language, based on primary linguistic data that has been collected over several generations. The work conducted in the Institute ranges from historical dictionaries describing Old and Middle Polish, to dictionaries of contemporary Polish, including the most comprehensive dictionary of contemporary Polish, developed exclusively in electronic format: Wielki słownik języka polskiego (The Great Dictionary of Polish). Our Lexicographic projects investigate not only standard Polish, but also its varieties, including regional dialects. A systematic description of the latter is provided by the Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of Polish Regional Dialects). The Institute also develops several dictionaries of proper names.

Since the foundation of the Institute (in 1973), the scope of its studies has extended beyond lexicographical work, involving research on both Polish and general linguistics. Representatives of the Institute are members of scholarly and state administration organisations responsible for toponym policies. In addition to the mainstream research on the mother tongue, employees of the Institute work on the Dictionary of Medieval Latin in Poland, and on problems in linguistic geography, which are part of international projects such as the Slavic Linguistic Atlas and the Atlas of European Languages. Recently the Institute has become increasingly involved in digital humanities, thanks to the use of quantitative linguistic methods, especially in stylometry and in corpus related projects. The dictionaries and other original electronic resources created by the Institute are available on this website.