Presentation

The EUDIA research team at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) is multidisciplinary and includes language teaching specialists from two departments: Language and Literature Didactics and Basque Language and Communication. In addition, the following PhDs are part of the research group and are recognized for their scientific careers in the university and international field, which continue to collaborate with the group actively: Xarles Videgain, Iñaki Gaminde and Gotzon Aurrekoetxea.

This group was created to investigate the variation of the Basque language at the Faculty of Arts in Vitoria by Gotzon Aurrekoetxea. At the beginning of the research group, the main objective was to study the variation of the Basque language, to specify the factors, both social and other, that produce this variation and to create research tools. Therefore, they worked on the investigation of geolinguistic or diatopic variation, sociolinguistic or diastratric variation and diaphasic variation. Consequently, the “Socio-geolinguistic Atlas of Basque (EAS)” was created. Thanks to this project, approved by the UPV/EHU (UPV 05/72), data was collected, between 2005 and 2007, in 75 municipalities of the Southern Basque Country, by means of a questionnaire of 201 questions; in each municipality the data was collected from witnesses of two generations. Subsequently, the project “Oral dialectal corpus of the current Basque language (EDAK)” (HUM 2007/65094 approved by the MEC) and the “Interactive Prosodic Atlas (EAPI)” were elaborated. As the scope of the EUDIA research group was the variation of the Basque language, a firm decision was made to use computerized tools, and other tools were also developed, such as CorpusLem and Diatech. Therefore, work began in the field of computerized or automated dialectology.

Shortly afterwards, prosodic competence was written about in several publications because it was considered an essential component of oral communication competence (Garay, et. al., 2011; Gaminde, et. al., 2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2014). Based on this idea, the production and perception of immigrant languages heard in the Basque Country was studied (Garay, et. al, 2011, 2012; Larrea, et. al., 2013; Gaminde, et. al., 2016), among others the following languages were recorded in the Adult Education Center of Iturribide, in the Crea-África center and in several villages (Markina, Arrigorriaga…): Wolof, Lingala, Aymara, Quechua, Portuguese, Galician, Chinese and Japanese.

Subsequently, both the research topic and the methodological aspect were modified. Scientific works are carried out (Garay, et. al., 2011; Gaminde, et. al., 2012; Gaminde, et. al., 2013a, 2013b; Gaminde, et. al., 2016, 2017) that study the suprasegmental elements in reading aloud (rhythm, borderline tones, prosodic pauses and peaks), and the prosodic components from the point of view of linguistic variation (Gaminde, et. al., 2014, 2015). With the intention of advancing the study of prosody, new avenues of research have been opened, which are audiovisual prosody and the characterization of aprosody. Finally, the study of oral language acquisition is becoming increasingly important, the results of which have been published in international journals and in a doctoral thesis.