Fundéu

The Fundación del Español Urgente (Fundéu) is a foundation created in February 2005 in Madrid from the Department of Urgent Spanish of Agencia EFE. It is the result of the agreement and equitable participation in its constitution of Agencia EFE and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), which was its main sponsor until 2020. In 2020, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and Agencia EFE signed an agreement to relaunch the foundation with the official name FundéuRAE.

The main objective of the Foundation is to ensure the proper use of the Spanish language in the media, especially the news media, and it has the advice of the Royal Spanish Academy.

Activities

The Foundation, which was promoted by the then president of the EFE Agency Álex Grijelmo, is, as its first president, Víctor García de la Concha, pointed out, "a fundamental step for the unity of the language" and is, together with the Instituto Cervantes and the Royal Spanish Academy itself, one of the main entities on the use and standard of Spanish, more specifically dedicated to the current language (hence the name "urgent"). Its scope of action is the Spanish-speaking world.

To fulfill its objectives, the Foundation develops two fundamental tasks:

• It publishes a daily recommendation on the good use of Spanish, based on doubts detected in the main Spanish media. These tips are published on your website (under Creative Commons license) and are distributed through social networks, the lines of the EFE Agency and a free mailing list that has more than 50 000 subscribers.
• Respond seven days a week to queries about the use of the language you receive via email, the existing form on your website, phone and social media (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram).

The Fundéu completes its work with the following activities:

• Since September 2007, it has maintained the Wikilengua, a collaborative site with wiki technology and Creative Commons license, on Spanish standard, use and style.
• It maintains open profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to disseminate its recommendations and respond to the linguistic doubts of its followers.
• Since 2013 he has chosen his word of the year from among those to which he has dedicated some of his daily recommendations and which gather linguistic and journalistic interest. The chosen ones so far have been escrache (2013), selfi (2014), refugee (2015), populism (2016), aporophobia (2017), microplastic (2018), emoticonos and emojis (2019), confinement (2020), vaccine (2021) and artificial intelligence (2022). [1]
• Participate regularly in various radio programs to talk about language. Produces, together with EFE Radio, Urgent Spanish with Fundéu, a microspace on language and current that is broadcast weekly on Radio 5 and can be downloaded as a poster.
• It organizes annually in collaboration with the San Millán de la Cogolla Foundation an international seminar on language and journalism.
• He has been part of the jury of the Spanish phase of the spelling contest.
• Participates in the project Easy dictionary, promoted by Plena Inclusion Madrid to promote the readership of persons with intellectual disabilities.

She is also responsible for the Manual de español urgente, published since 1976 and now in its nineteenth edition (2016), of the book Escribir en internet: guía para los nuevos media y las social networks, presented at the headquarters of the Royal Spanish Academy on September 20, 2012, of the Illustrated and random compendium of everything you ever wanted to know about the Spanish language, published by the editorial Debate on November 20, 2012, of the Second illustrated and delightful compendium of everything you ever wanted to know about the Spanish language, also published by Debate, in June 2016 and of El español more alive. 300 recommendations for speaking and writing edited by Espasa in 2015.

To carry out its functions, it has a work team directed and coordinated by the journalist Javier Lascurain Sánchez (who replaced Joaquín Muller-Thyssen Bergareche in 2020, director from the beginning of Fundéu until December 2019) made up of philologists, translators, proofreaders and linguists, with the help of a network of collaborators in different countries of America. It also has an advisory council made up of linguists, academics, journalists and economists: Víctor García de la Concha, José Manuel Blecua Perdices, Francisco Javier Pérez, Leonardo Gómez Torrego, Soledad Gallego-Díaz, Victoria Prego, José María Merino, Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez, Pilar García-Mouton, Mario Tascón, Manuel Conthe, Montserrat Domínguez, Jorge Bustos and Juan Soto Ivars.

The Board of Trustees, which is the governing body of the Foundation, has as first vice-president the president of Agencia EFE, Gabriela Cañas. Previously, the directors of the Royal Spanish Academy Víctor García de la Concha, José Manuel Blecua and Darío Villanueva, and the journalist Mario Tascón have held the presidency. Currently, the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado, is the Foundation's honorary president. The president of the Government of La Rioja and the San Millán Concha Andreu Foundation, the director of the Instituto Cervantes Luis García Montero, and the former presidents of the EFE Agency Luis María Anson, Alfonso Sobrado Palomares, Miguel Ángel, are members of the Board of Trustees. Gozalo and José Antonio Vera Gil.

In July 2016, the Fundéu Guzmán Ariza was created in the Dominican Republic thanks to the sponsorship of the Guzmán Ariza Foundation and the Dominican Academy of Language and in 2017, through an agreement with the International Institute of the Spanish Language Foundation (FIILE), the Fundéu Argentina.

In January 2012, the Fundéu, in the person of its then president, José Manuel Blecua, was awarded the Miguel Moya prize awarded by the Madrid Press Association (APM) to that person, not specifically a journalist, to which is recognized for extensive and outstanding work in the field of journalism.

In 2021, the RAE and the EFE Agency sign an agreement to relaunch the Fundéu, which is renamed FundéuRAE. The two great promoters of FundéuRAE, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language and the EFE Agency, are committed to guaranteeing its viability, always preserving the unity of the linguistic criteria.

Queen Letizia of Spain has held the honorary presidency of FundéuRAE since January 2021.

History

Urgent Spanish Department

At the end of the 1970s, the president of Agencia EFE, Luis María Anson, commissioned the academic Fernando Lázaro Carreter to write the first Manual de estilo for the editors of the agency, which was published in 1978. This was the first step in a process that continued with the creation in 1980, in collaboration with the Institute for Ibero-American Cooperation (ICI), of the Department of Urgent Spanish (DEU), formed by a group of members of the Royal Spanish Academy and a team of philologists.

The academics formed the Style Advisory Council of the EFE Agency, which met weekly with those responsible for writing to analyze doubts and errors that arose in the news. It was made up of Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Antonio Tovar, Manuel Alvar, Luis Rosales and the general secretary of the Association of Spanish Language Academies (and academic of the Colombian), José Antonio León Rey.

The team of philologists, made up of Guillermo Lorenzo, Pedro García Domínguez, Alberto Gómez Font and Carlos Ramírez de Dampierre, answered the journalists' queries and reviewed the teletypes to detect errors and advise the correct forms.

This structure of the DEU remained like this until 2005, when Álex Grijelmo was appointed president of EFE and promoted, with the sponsorship of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, the creation of the current Fundéu.