CLUL is a Portuguese public R&D institution founded in 1932 as a centre of philological studies. It developed into a research centre in linguistics that expanded its activities and scientific intervention over time. The centre is hosted by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon (FLUL) and committed to research and development in the field of linguistics, with a particular emphasis on Portuguese − including dialectal, diachronic, social and national varieties − and on Portuguese-related Creoles.

CLUL is a research community where a productive dialogue between elder and younger areas of language research (such as philology, dialectology, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, experimental linguistics and speech technologies) takes place. The centre’s research is directed towards theoretical and theoretically-oriented descriptive research leading to novel contributions to linguistic analysis. In doing so, we bear in mind the need to strengthen the interaction with the international scientific community in the field and the concern with the dissemination of results to other professionals and to the general public.

On the one hand, CLUL aims to endow researchers with data and tools conceived to promote and further enhance investigation in linguistics or related areas. By combining field work, archive and laboratorial research, and computer-based treatment of linguistic data, the centre has been producing, updating and refining resources for linguistic analysis.

On the other hand, CLUL aims at contributing to understanding language knowledge, acquisition and use, from the mental representation of grammar(s) to oral and written language processing, from language acquisition and development to language production across time, regions and people.