The establishment of the Bulgarian Literary Society in 1869 in Braila marked the beginning of a new stage in the development of the Bulgarian philological studies. The growing need for establishment of a uniform literary language was fully - realized by the founders of the BLS, hence one of the central ideas of the BLS was to assist the development and improvement of the Bulgarian Literary language and to put on broad foundations the studying of the Bulgarian history and literature.
      With the moving of the Bulgarian Literary Society (subsequently restructured into the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) from Braila, and the establishment of the Higher School of Sofia (the future University of Sofia), two centers for development of philological studies were founded: the Faculty of History and Philology at the Higher School of Sofia and the Department of History and Philology at the Bulgarian Literary Society. With an act of 1911 the Bulgarian Literary Society was restructured into Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the new institution started its activity by establishing an ad hoc Dictionary Committee, which launched the compilation of a dictionary of the Bulgarian language, named Dictionary of the Bulgarian language and Dialects. Extensive lexicographic work in the following years lead to the establishment of the Bulgarian Dictionary Service on 15 May 1942 at the BAS and Arts. After the re-organizations of the BAS in 1947, the Bulgarian Dictionary Service was renamed Institute for Bulgarian Dictionary and in 1949 the Institute for Bulgarian Language came into existence.
      The directors and the management of the BAS launched a wide range of activities aiming at the expansion of the fields of study of the Institute. Research work in Modern Bulgarian Language, dialectology, historical linguistics, lexicology and lexicography grew in the following years.
      The Institute for Bulgarian Language started issuing a number of magazines and series where the results of the work carried out at the Institute are published. These are the magazines “Bulgarian Language”, “Balkan Linguistics" and the as well as a number of series such as “Proceedings of the Institute for Bulgarian Language" organ of IBL, which since 1995 has been succeeded by the series “Bulgarian linguistics”. Since 1959 the issue of “Linguistique balkanique” started, a magazine dedicated to the study of the Bulgarian and the Balkan languages. One of the newest editions is the bulletin “Lexicographic review” which started in 1998.
      Beside theoretical scholarly research one of the objectives of the Institute for Bulgarian Language has been the creation of normative grammatical descriptions of the Bulgarian language. The three-volume Grammar of the Modern Bulgarian Literary Language, published in the 70s, summarizes the work of a team of Bulgarian linguists and is considered one of the most authoritative grammar descriptions of Bulgarian. Extensive lexicographic work yielded a number of dictionaries and reference books.
      For the implementation of various research projects a number of corpora have been created enabling comprehensive study of dialectological, etymological, toponymic and terminological material as well as exhaustive study of the linguistic phenomena . Another information source is the Institute's library to which generations of scholars have contributed for collecting its book-stock of more than 30 000 books.