The Sorbian Institute is a research facility focused on Sorbian languages, culture and history. It is an extra-university institute collecting and archiving Sorbian texts and cultural artifacts making them available to the public. Originally founded as Institute for Sorbian Ethnology by Pawoł Nowotny in 1951, it was then integrated into the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in 1952. In 1992, the Sorbian institute was established by a treaty of the two German states Brandenburg and Saxony.