The History and Historiography of Spanish Language in its Diachrony (HISLEDIA) is a long-standing research group at the Universitat de València. Its lines of research – history and historiography of the Spanish language in its diachrony – were initiated by Emilio Ridruejo in the early 1980s and led to the creation of a chair of History of Language and Dialectology, which was occupied by María Teresa Echenique Elizondo in 1987. After Ridruejo’s transfer to the University of Valladolid in 1988, the group was headed by Echenique until her retirement in 2020, when María José Martínez Alcalde became the director of the group. The HISLEDIA Group has developed 10 research projects funded through competitive calls, in which researchers from different Spanish and foreign universities have participated, contributing to the international projection of the Group and the consolidation of its research activity. Since its creation, HISLEDIA has analysed fundamental aspects of the evolution of Spanish from a historical and historiographical point of view. However, it has not neglected the contrastive perspective in relation to the other languages and linguistic varieties of the Hispanic sphere – mainly Basque, Catalan, Aragonese and Portuguese.

The group members have participated in leading national and international congresses, have produced a significant number of high impact publications (as a group and individually) and have a solid track record in training research staff and supervising doctoral theses. In addition, HISLEDIA has extensive experience in organising congresses, symposia, conferences and specialist meetings. These include the V International Congress of History of the Spanish Language (UV, 2000), the International Symposium ‘Lexicography, Grammatical Codification and Phraseology in honour of G. Haensch’ (Universitat de València and University of Augsburg, 2003), the exhibition ‘Rafael Lapesa’s legacy: Valencia 1908–Madrid 2002’ (Valencian Library and Instituto Cervantes, 2008), the XXVI International Congress of Linguistics and Romance Philology (Valencia, 2010) – with a section specifically dedicated to HISLEDIA’s research –, the Conference on Grammatical Codification of the Spanish Language: History and Historiography (UV, 2004), the International Conferences on Historical Phraseology (1^st and 2^nd editions, UV, 2015 and 2016), the coordination of the Historical Phraseology Section of the Congress of German Hispanists (Munich, 2017), the International Scientific Conference ‘Contrastive History and Historiography of Spanish Language’ (UV, 2018) and the organisation of the XIII Congress of the Spanish Society of Linguistic Historiography (UV, 2022).