Established in 1930. Its first director was H. Tkachenko, succeeded by N. Kahanovych, M. Kalynovych, L. Bulakhovskiy, I. Bilodid, and V. Rusanivskiy. Since 1996 it has been headed by NAS academician V. H. Skliarenko. For many years the Institute had been the only linguistic research institution in Ukraine. In 1991 the NAS Institute of the Ukrainian Language was formed on the basis of the Department of Theory and History of Ukrainian, Department of Dialectology and Onomastics and Department of Lexicology and Lexicography.
O. O. Potebnya Institute of Linguistics is a leading multi-disciplinary research center and the principal Ukrainian research-coordination institution, working out theoretical and methodological fundamentals of general, Slavic, Baltic, Romance, Germanic, structural&mathematical and applied linguistics. Its main objective is fundamental and applied research aimed at obtaining new scholarly knowledge and promoting spiritual progress of Ukrainian society.
At the moment, Institute incorporates the Department of General Linguistics; Department of General Slavic Issues and East Slavic Languages; Department of Western and South Slavic Languages; Department of the Russian Language; Department of Romance, Germanic and Baltic Languages; and Department of Structural&Mathematical Linguistics. Their work is focused on several crucial areas of linguistic research, developing theoretical background for tackling specific linguistic problems, providing foundation for scholarly linguistic studies and providing basis for compiling new textbooks, manuals, dictionaries etc.
The research direction ‘Theory and methodology of linguistic research’ provides theoretical basis of linguistic studies, it also deals with sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, ethno- and cognitive linguistics, in particular elucidating relationship between language and national mentality, as well as that between language and cognition.
The main objective of research done in the area ‘Slavic languages in the context of the world cultural and historical realities’ is studying the origin, development and functioning of East Slavic, West Slavic and South Slavic languages in the context of general Slavic studies and contrastive analysis of Slavic languages at the levels of phonetics, morphology, syntax and word formation. Also important and much-needed are contrastive studies of such closely related languages as Ukrainian and Russian, conducted within research direction ‘Functioning of the Russian language in Ukraine. Contrastive studies of Russian and Ukrainian’.
Internationally unparalleled is a unified research of Romance, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages, carried out within the research direction ‘Comparative study of Romance, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages’.
Undoubtedly promising is the study area ‘Principles of creating linguistic processors (textual and dictionary ones)’ A comprehensive morphemic-derivational computer base of Ukrainian is already in operation, designed for computerized compilation of new-generation Ukrainian dictionaries. Algorithms and programs for morphological and syntactic analysis of Ukrainian texts made up the basis on which the ‘Ruta’ authomatic spelling-control system and the ‘Play’ Russian-Ukrainian/Ukrainian-Russian machine-translation system were developed.
Since 1967 the Institute has published “Movoznavstvo” scholarly&theoretical journal.