The Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) is a non-university research institute of the federal state of Berlin that is jointly funded by the federal and state governments. The sponsoring association is the Verein Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V. (GWZ).
At ZAS, the human capacity for language and its expression through individual languages is explored with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the biological, cognitive, and social factors surrounding this central human ability. By exploring the structures of language, how they are acquired, and how they are processed, this knowledge can be applied to fields such as speech diagnostics or speech technology.
The diverse research team at ZAS is divided into four research areas, in which experts from many core areas of linguistics are active: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics and pragmatics, as well as child language acquisition. This concentration of active research in multiple linguistic sub-disciplines in a single institution is unique in Germany and facilitates a direct exchange of current research results and methods. A phonetics laboratory, a psycholinguistics laboratory, a motion capture laboratory and a child language laboratory can be used at ZAS for empirical testing and experimental modelling of predictions. In addition, the scientific work at ZAS is based on corpus linguistic methods and field research.
The ZAS research programme is oriented around specific research themes, which determine the work for at least four to six years in the medium-term. Ideally, a research theme calls for the expertise of several research areas. Each research area also hosts externally acquired third-party funded projects that contribute to the content of one or more of the research themes. ZAS is and has been very successful in acquiring such funding. ZAS’s excellent international reputation makes it an attractive research location for international visiting researchers and scholarship-holders. The collaboration of these researchers as well as the numerous national and international workshops and conferences hosted at the institute provide an important catalyst for the scientific work at ZAS.
ZAS's extensive research library is not only available to employees of the institute, but also to other linguistic institutions, as well as to students studying linguistics in Berlin and Potsdam. Researchers and staff at ZAS support university-level education by teaching courses and helping to coordinate linguistic research in Berlin and in joint EU projects. ZAS is also involved in various interdisciplinary research networks and alliances of the Leibniz Association.
As far as the transfer of knowledge to politics and society is concerned, ZAS for example plays a particularly important role in the area of multilingualism at regional, national and international levels. The findings from foundational research are incorporated into day-to-day political decisions in a variety of ways, as well as into the development of diagnostic procedures and training programmes for teachers and caregivers.