EUDIA Research groups

The EUDIA group is multidisciplinary and consists of specialists in the study and teaching of language from two departments: Didactics of Language and Literature, and Basque Language and Communication. In addition, the following renowned doctors, recognized for their scientific careers in the university and international fields, are part of the research group and continue to actively collaborate with it: Xarles Videgain, Iñaki Gaminde, and Gotzon Aurrekoetxea.This group was created to investigate the variation of the Basque language at the Faculty of Letters in Vitoria, led by Gotzon Aurrekoetxea. Initially, the main objective was to study the variation of the Basque language, specifying the factors, both social and otherwise, that produce this variation and creating research tools. Therefore, they worked on the research of geolinguistic or diatopic variation, sociolinguistic or diastratic variation, and diafasic variation. Consequently, the "Socio-Geolinguistic Atlas of Basque (EAS)" was created. Thanks to this project, approved by the UPV/EHU (UPV 05/72), data were collected between 2005 and 2007 in 75 municipalities of the Southern Basque Country using a questionnaire with 201 questions; in each municipality, data from witnesses of two generations were collected. Subsequently, the project "Oral Dialectal Corpus of Current Basque (EDAK)" (HUM 2007/65094, approved by the MEC) and the "Interactive Prosodic Atlas (EAPI)" were developed. Since the EUDIA group's field of study was the variation of the Basque language, it was decided to use computerized tools, and other tools such as CorpusLem and Diatech were also developed. Therefore, they began working in the field of informatized or automated dialectology. Shortly after, they started writing about prosodic competence in several publications because it was considered an essential component of oral communicative competence (Garay, et al., 2011; Gaminde, et al., 2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2014). Based on this idea, they studied the production and perception of immigrant languages heard in the Basque Country (Garay, et al., 2011, 2012; Larrea, et al., 2013; Gaminde, et al., 2016), including recordings of the following languages at the Iturribide Adult Education Center, the Crea-África center, and various towns (Markina, Arrigorriaga...): Wolof, Lingala, Aymara, Quechua, Portuguese, Galician, Chinese, and Japanese. Later, both the research topic and the methodological approach were modified. Scientific works (Garay, et al., 2011; Gaminde, et al., 2012; Gaminde, et al., 2013a, 2013b; Gaminde, et al., 2016, 2017; Iglesias et al., 2025; Unamuno & Unamuno, 2025) that study suprasegmental elements in reading aloud (rhythm, boundary tones, pauses, and prosodic peaks) and prosodic components from the point of view of linguistic variation (Gaminde, et al., 2014, 2015) were carried out. With the intention of advancing in the study of prosody linked to reading, the Irakurlab Reading Laboratory (Etxebarria et al., 2023) has been created, which classifies readers according to their oral and visual reading characteristics and comprehension. Additionally, it develops innovative studies and didactic resources in the field of ethical and sustainable communication, being a reference in the living lab methodology. Linked to this, a microcredential is currently being taught at the UPV/EHU on linguistic, artistic, and digital resources in oral communication.