The department has very strong research environments within linguistics and houses one of the world’s foremost research communities in linguistics represented by Center for Language, Brain and Learning (C-LaBL). The center is funded by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation and UiT. The department has two top research groups: Language Acquisition, Variation, and Linguistic Attrition with a focus on Norwegian contexts (AcqVA-Nor) and Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian (CLEAR). Additionally, there are research groups such as Giellatekno (Sami language technology) and The Multilingual North: Diversity, Education, and Revitalization (MultiNor). Within literature studies, art history, and media and documentation studies, the department has the following research groups: Arctic Voices, Engaging Conflicts in a Digital Era (ENCODE), Health, Art and Society (HAS), Interdisciplinary Phenomenology (IP), Pax Slavia in Flux: European Contexts (PSIF), and Worlding Northern Art (WONA).

The department also has the following research networks: Libraries, Archives, and Museums in the Community (LAMCOM), Marginalization in Early Modern Spain: Theories and Practices (MEMS), Sami Language Acquisition and Revitalization (SámGOE), The Hamsun/Ibsen Network, Narrating the Postcolonial North and Didactics for Sami and Kven Language and Literature (DISK).