The journal was established in 1958 by Roman Jakobson,
Francis J. Whitfield, and
Cornelis Hendrik van Schooneveld with the financial assistance of the
Harvard University's
Committee for the Promotion of Advanced Slavic Cultural Studies. The journal saw "a variety of contributors and theoretical approaches". Alongside
Edward Stankiewicz and
Christian Stang, Dean Stoddard Worth joined as editor early on, and reained its editor through the last volume. Walter N. Vickery was also an editor at one point. Jakobson has been described as the "moving spirit" behind the journal. Founded three years after the last volume of
Slavic Word and two years after the establishment of the
Slavic and East European Journal (
SEEJ), the
IJSLP was both in chronology and editorial board composition a successor of
Slavic Word quickly became a "major forum" for American Slavic linguists, coexisting with the
SEEJ. For the first decade, it was an annual publication and one of the dominant journals in American Slavistics, but gradually it fell off in favour of other journals. Jakobson's personal involvement in the journal's content curation was sometimes a matter of contention. In 1969, when Michael Shapiro published a negative review in
Language of a book by one of Jakobson's
Harvard students, Jakobson published the student's rebuttal in
IJSLP, telephoned to convince the dean of Shapiro's
UCLA college to turn him down for tenure when it came up in 1970, and initially refused to publish his counter-rebuttal in the
IJSLP. Dean Worth threatened to resign as Managing Editor if it was not published, so Jakobson backed down. In 1982, it was the oldest of 6 Slavic studies periodicals published in the Netherlands. The volume that year was published as a
Festschrift dedicated to Edward Stankiewicz. Upon the death of Jakobson in 1982, a special memorial volume titled
Roman Jakobson: What He Taught Us was published as a supplement to volume 27. The 1985 volume was also published as a
Festschrift, dedicated to
Henrik Birnbaum. Later on, major irregularities in its publication schedule arose, including a 7 year gap between the 1988 volume and its publication in 1995. The last volume to require physical
typesetting was 39–40, published in 1996. After its publication was discontinued, many of its contributors shifted to the
Journal of Slavic Linguistics (). Some papers published in early issues are still cited today. Some of these are listed in Bethin 2006. ==See also==