It is the central extramural institute for research and documentation of the German language in its contemporary usage and its recent history.

As a member of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft (Leibniz-Association), the IDS is financed both by the federal government and by the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The department is divided into two areas that work with contemporary theoretical and methodological standards of German linguistics and simultaneously employ computational-linguistic and statistical methods.

The area Corpus Linguistics supervises the expansion, annotation, and analysis of (written language) electronic corpora of German and develops methods and techniques of corpus-linguistic, empirical research.

Besides, the IDS provides online the archive corpora of written language (nine million book pages) as well as a specialized library that collects literature that encompasses all areas of present-day German linguistics.