Departments

The Institute is one of the three centres in Estonia carrying out systematic research into the Estonian language, and the only institution studying the development of the language.  The Institute has six departments.

Department of Modern Estonian

The main tasks of the department:

- research , description and development of modern Estonian;

- compilation of the EKI Combined Dictionary and other dictionaries;

- development of the language portaal Sõnaveeb in cooperation with the company TripleDev;

- development of the dictionary and terminology writing system Ekilex in cooperation with the company TripleDev - the develompent is financed by EKI-ASTRA programme (2016-2022)

- management of the national terminology programme; compilation of the terminology database Esterm;

- provision of language consultancy services;

- language planning research and activities, plain language research and development;

- development of language learning resources for language learners and teachers;

- development of new corpora together with the software company SketchEngine;

- preparation in the organisation of the annual international conference for Applied Linguistics.

Department of Speech Research and Technology

The main tasks of the department are the development of Estonian text-to-speech synthesis and its applications, and speech research motivated by the needs of speech technology. Our research areas include Estonian phonetics, speech styles, sentence prosody, phonological variation and emotional speech

Department of Language History, Dialects, and Finno-Ugric Languages

The department studies the history of the Estonian language and the mechanisms that influenced its formation with the aim of helping to ensure the usability and sustainability of the Estonian language. Another task of the department is to support the sustainability and development of some smaller cognate languages. The department (1) prepares and edits the dictionaries of Estonian dialects, etymology and Finno-Ugric languages; (2) studies the origins and history of the Estonian language, dialects of the Estonian language, and the Finno-Ugric languages; (3) maintains and updates the scientific archives and databases of the Estonian dialects and closely related Finno-Ugric languages. 

Competence Centre for Natural Language Processing

The main aim of the Centre is to ensure the digital sustainability of the Estonian language by developing and integrating language technology resources and making those available to as many people as possible.

The Centre monitors the situation of language technology (LT) both locally and internationally, coordinates the national Language Technology Programme (“Estonian Language Technology 2018-2027”), develops, maintains and tests strategic language resources, participates in international networks (ELRC, ELG) together with the Ministry of Education and Research, leads national LT projects (eg. machine translation technology for the public sector) and introduces LT to the public and private sectors as well as to the general public.

Training Centre

The Training Centre provides training courses on various aspects of the Estonian language. Our courses focus on a wide range of topics, such as spelling issues, tips on avoiding officialese and the principles of plain language. We also show our customers how to use various language resources and applications.

Our main customers are state and local government institutions, educational institutions, law enforcement agencies, translation service providers, media companies, marketing and communication departments of private companies, and IT companies. Our courses, seminars and workshops are also open to all other professionals, regardless of the area of activity, who would like to improve their language skills in order to communicate clearly and effectively in their daily work.

General Administration Office 

The responsibilities of the office include implementation of the personnel policy and performing general administrative tasks. We also provide our employees with the support services related to the working environment. We are also in charge of the systematisation and administration of our reference collection.