The Central Institute Of Indian Languages (www.ciil.org) was set up on July 17, 1969. It is located in Mysore, Karnataka, India. It has seven regional language centers located at Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Lucknow, Mysore, Patiala, Pune and Solan. Since its inception it is involved in research, training and materials production in major Indian languages including minor, minority and tribal languages. It advises and assists both Central and State Governments in India in the matter of Languages, promotes all Indian languages by creating content and corpus, documents minor, minority and tribal languages of India, creates situation conducive to linguistic harmony by teaching 15 Indian languages to non-native learners. Although the focus of the work at the Institute is on Indian languages and linguistics, CIIL has projects and faculty interests in number of related areas like Psychology, Speech Sciences, Education, Folklore, Sociology, Translation, Comparative literature, Language Technology & Natural Language Processing, Geography and Statistics.

So far the Institute has archived data of 118 speech varieties and languages of India; studied 80 tribal and smaller languages. On the basis of linguistic studies, the Institute has created materials such as grammar, dictionary, phonetic reader, report on dialect survey etc.. CIIL has also produced instructional materials, teachers handbook and video taped teaching/learning materials. It has published around 496 books, brought out cassette courses in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Assamese, Urdu etc, and also created a corpora of around 3 million each in Major Indian languages.

Major endowers at present include creation of online courses in Indian Languages (jointly with Netaji Subhash Open University, Central Hindi Directorate and Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University), Anukriti - a multipurpose data base on translation and translation studies (uploaded jointly with Sahitya Akademi and National Book Trust in July 2002 at www.anukriti.net ), LISIndia - a massive data base on Indian languages (currently being worked on in collaboration with 35 academic institutions), creation of multilingual multidirectional dictionaries, publication of different e-journals, bringing out a library of Indian classics in translation through a project titled Katha-Bharati, setting up an archive of manuscripts of Indian writing as well as digitization of library resources under its project Bhasha-Bharati, enhancement of the existing 3 million corpora, and further creation of corpora in other minor, minority and tribal languages of India. The CIIL grammars are already available at a special web-site: www.ciilgrammars.org. The audio video programs are also to be uploaded soon at www.ciilaudiovideo.net.