A key year in the history of the Czech Language Institute was 1891, when the country’s leading research institution – the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts – was founded. Similarly to analogous institutions around the world, the Academy’s fundamental task was to compile a large explanatory dictionary of the national language. In 1906, František Pastrnek, leading lexicographer František Štěpán Kott and Josef Zubatý submitted a proposal to initiate preparatory work on the dictionary. To assess the proposal, the Academy set up a Class III Commission, whose efforts culminated in the founding of the oldest academy department – the Office of the Dictionary of the Czech Language – in 1911. The Office immediately began collecting lexical material for a Czech Language Handbook, which was published as individual volumes starting in 1935 until the completion of the series with the ninth volume in 1957.
After World War II the Office was transformed into an institute and its tasks were expanded to include research about Czech dialects, Czech language history and the issue of contemporary standard language. This marked the establishment of the Czech Language Institute in 1946, with the then-Chancellor Alois Získal serving as its first director.
In late 1952 the Institute’s Brno office established a dialectology department, along with an etymology department on the initiative of Václav Machek. After the founding of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1952, the Czech Language Institute was incorporated into its structure and became one of its cornerstone departments. Bohuslav Havránek, one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle, served as director until 1965. A number of leading Czech linguists subsequently led the Institute: František Daneš, Miloš Dokulil, Karel Horálek and Jan Petr. Following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Fratišek Daneš once again assumed the directorship. Jiří Kraus succeeded him, serving from 1994 to 2002, Karel Oliva headed the Institute from 2003 to 2016 and since 2016 Martin Prošek has been the director.
Since 1992 the Czech Language Institute has been part of the newly transformed Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
In 2011 the Czech Language Institute celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Office of the Dictionary of the Czech Language. You can find more information here.
