This article conducts a content analysis of the fi ve major science funds in China in an attempt to examine the guidelines and topics of linguistic studies funded by the five major funds between 2005 and 2014. The study describes the general situation of the five major funds, traces the directions of the funded research projects, and focuses on the hot topics in the “applied social sciences” domains. The result shows that National Natural Science Fund favors computational linguistics and language processing abilities, National Educational Science Fund focuses on language studies, and National Social Science Fund, Humanities & Social Science Fund of MOE and Fund of National Language Committee prioritize corpus studies. The authors conclude that the funded projects of linguistic studies refl ect the research demand at a national level. Based on these fi ndings, the article provides thoughts and implications for language research and language policy making processes.