Research Section

Corpora are structured sets of electronic texts used as a sample of part of the language, and reflect real uses. They are essential to the study of languages themselves and in other tasks related to these. Thus, Euskaltzaindia has pioneered the Basque corpus, in terms of both its construction and its use.

It was in the 1980s that the Academy created the first Basque corpus, a diachronic corpus that was to serve as the basis for the Basque General Dictionary. It subsequently created the Statistical Corpus of 20th-Century Basque, and at the beginning of the 21st century set up the Lexis Observatory, the monitoring corpus. These corpora have been essential in meeting the needs of the time, the diachronic one, the 20th-century statistical one and the monitoring corpus, forming the basis of Euskaltzaindia's projects, especially in the case of the Basque General Dictionary and the Dictionary of Euskaltzaindia.

In the first quarter of the 21st century, the Academy has created the Basque Reference Corpus, using texts from numerous agents. This is a dynamic, balanced, quality corpus, which will be a constant reflection of the Basque of the last 25 years.