The Andrés Bello University Institute of Linguistics (INULAB) was created in 1976 by the University of La Laguna, at the suggestion of Professor Ramón Trujillo, one of the individuals who, along with Professor Gregorio Salvador, contributed most to modernizing language studies at our former Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, later the Faculty of Philology, and now the Faculty of Humanities. Apparently, Professor Trujillo's intention was to create a philological research center with an Atlantic focus, acting as a link between Spain and the Americas—the role that the Canary Islands had always played in the Hispanic world. The project was truly promising, and its founder and first director made several trips to the Americas to promote it.
The Andrés Bello University Institute of Linguistics (INULAB) was created in 1976 by the University of La Laguna, at the suggestion of Professor Ramón Trujillo, one of the individuals who, along with Professor Gregorio Salvador, contributed most to modernizing language studies at our former Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, later the Faculty of Philology, and now the Faculty of Humanities. Apparently, Professor Trujillo's intention was to create a philological research center with an Atlantic focus, acting as a link between Spain and the Americas—the role that the Canary Islands had always played in the Hispanic world. The project was truly promising, and its founder and first director made several trips to the Americas to promote it.
The expansion experienced by our university in recent decades and the restructuring of its centers led our Institute to open its doors to other languages, such as Classical Latin and Greek, Modern Greek, English, French, Arabic, etc., and to new lines of research in the study of language, in addition to the semantics, dialectology, grammar, and sociolinguistics of the initial phase. This opening, which has gradually taken shape and has been led in this century by different management teams—first, by Professors Manuel Almeida Suárez and Francisco J. Castillo Martín; then, by Professor Francisco J. Cortés Rodríguez and Professor M.ª Isabel González Aguiar; thirdly, by Professors Dolores García Padrón and M.ª del Carmen Fumero Pérez; fourthly, by Professor José J. Batista Rodríguez and Professor M.ª del Carmen Fumero Pérez; and fifthly, by Professor Marcial Morera Pérez and Professor Ana Díaz Galán; and currently, by professors Juana Herrera Santana and Ana Díaz Galán – has been truly enriching.
Today, the Andrés Bello Institute of Linguistics has around thirty research professors from our university belonging to different areas of knowledge and departments, a dozen doctoral students, and several associated researchers from other national and foreign universities (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gaston Berger University of Saint-Louis in Senegal, Leipzig, etc.), all united around various research groups; it serves as a framework for multiple research projects in grammar, lexicology, lexicography, sociolinguistics, dialectology, text linguistics, language teaching, translation studies, natural language processing, etc., some of them funded by the State or the Canary Islands Autonomous Community; it publishes dozens and dozens of articles, book chapters, and books a year; it participates in numerous national and international conferences; and it regularly organizes diverse scientific activity in the form of courses, conferences, seminars, congresses, etc.