UZEI is a not for profit professional organisation founded in 1977 with the aim of modernising the corpus of Basque so that any Basque speaker would be able to use their language accurately and precisely in any specialist area.

UZEI was the first Basque institution to undertake terminological work, and set up the EUSKALTERM terminology centre in 1986.

In 1987 it was constituted as a Basque government trustee entity for research applied to linguistic planning, signing a Cooperation Agreement with the latter in accordance with the provisions of Decree 226/1987 of 16 June.

In 1989 UZEI was recognised by the Basque government as a public interest entity on the grounds that it promoted the general interest of the Basque Country in the field of linguistic research.

UZEI's goal is research into and promotion of Basque. UZEI's current lines of activity are as follows:

General Dictionary: the Lexicography Department is carrying out the task of researching and subsequently drawing up reports for the Euskaltzaindia (Royal Academy of the Basque Language) Unified Dictionary.

Creation of Corpus: UZEI is a pioneer in the design and lemmatisation of a text corpus. An outstanding achievement is its corpus of 20th century Basque. At present it is working on the development of translation corpus management systems.

Technical dictionaries: UZEI set up the EUSKALTERM public terminology bank and builds the dictionaries it creates into it. UZEI is a member of the Terminology Commission set up by the Basque government to foster terminological normalisation.

Technical translations: directly connected with terminology, it translates and localises specialist texts in computing, law, medicine, architecture, business management, etc.

Education: in order to publicise its work, UZEI organises conferences and workshops and also delivers first degree and post-graduate education in its fields of speciality.

Language technologies: UZEI is a member of INNOBASQUE and has a number of ongoing lines of research in its fundamental specialities (terminology and lexicography).

UZEI is a signatory of the Brussels Declaration (see attached document).