In accordance with Academia Sinica’s long-term development policy 'institutes for basic sciences and centers for inter-disciplinary research' , the Preparatory Office of the Institute of Linguistics was set up in 1997 with the goals to explore the commonly shared biological, mathematical, and cultural foundation of human language in order to establish scientific and systematic knowledge towards human language. A full-fledged Institute was subsequently established in 2004. The overall objective of the Institute is to achieve scientific and systematic knowledge about human language by conducting basic linguistic as well as interdisciplinary research focusing on languages of Taiwan and genetically and areally-related languages. Important contributions have been made especially in linguistic structure analyses, language archiving, text, speech and physiology corpora, linguistic computation and simulation, and cross-discipline studies.