The Leibniz Institute for the German Language (Institute for the German Language, IDS) in Mannheim is the central extramural institute for research and documentation of the German language in its contemporary usage and its recent history. As a member of the Leibniz Association (Leibniz Gemeinschaft), the IDS is financed by the federal government and by the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
More than 120 academic staff members, about 40employees from administration, IT, the library etc. as well as approximately 80 (student) assistants work for the IDS, making it one of the major humanistic research institutes of the Leibniz Association.
The grammatical structure of contemporary German is the main research interest in the “Department of Grammar”, while the “Department of Lexical Studies” studies and documents the lexical portfolio of contemporary German and its recent history. The “Department of Pragmatics” examines spoken German and the use of German in conversation. The “Department of Digital Linguistics” conducts linguistic research on text collections in the area of Corpus Linguistics and deals with the development and configuration of research infrastructures. Research activities pursuing predominantly cross-departmental objectives are pooled together in the organisational unit “Central Research”, which is subject to the IDS’s director.