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Book Review - Observing Eurolects: Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in EU law (2018) ed. Laura Mori

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Journal of Languages, Texts, and Society, Vol. 4 (2020), 1-3 [online].
© 2020 by Edward Clay.
Book Review
Observing Eurolects: Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in
EU law. Edited by Laura Mori. John Benjamins, 2018. ISBN:
9789027201706, 394 pp.
Although often thought of as self-contained, homogeneous entities, all of
the world’s languages are made up of countless different varieties and
sub-varieties, which are continually emerging, shifting and
disappearing. Varieties of the same language can differ with regard to
their phonetic, lexical, syntactic, or stylistic content, and can be
relatively close to the so-called ‘standard variety’ or significantly distant
from it. These variations may be the result of geographical difference,
such as between British and American English, but can also be due to
different registers, such as the difference between the language used
when talking to a friend on the phone and when delivering a formal
address. This concept of varieties within languages is the central thread
running through Observing Eurolects, which seeks to answer its
overarching hypothesis: has the multilingual EU legislation
environment given rise to a new variety of legal language, known as a
‘Eurolect’?
Observing Eurolects is the result of work carried out by the
members of the Eurolect Observatory Project, which has taken an
innovative approach in examining variational patterns in legal
language. The contributors are fifteen academics from universities
across Europe. The book takes a systematic approach, dealing with each
language separately in different chapters before bringing the results
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together to reach a final conclusion. The opening chapters provide the
details of the methodology used to investigate the languages in
question. In order to carry out large-scale analyses and sophisticated
data visualisation techniques, the project uses methods from corpus
linguistics to compile and analyse different EU languages across a ten-
year time span (1999-2008). One of the greatest strengths of this book is
that it standardises the methodological framework across the study of
all eleven languages involved, meaning that the results can be
effectively compared and cross-referenced, enabling more
comprehensive conclusions to be drawn.
In order to explain how the putative new language varieties may
have developed in practice, the research adopts the concept of
translation-induced language change, which is based on the premise
that if languages are in contact in a translation environment for long
enough and if this contact is intense enough, then language change can
occur. In this context, the multilingual EU environment constitutes an
ideal point of study, since it has created a ‘sui generis language contact
scenario’ (9). Huge numbers of legal texts are drafted and translated by
the EU institutions each year across all the official languages, therefore
languages are in constant contact with each other in translation.
Consequently, as attested by the various studies in this book, this
situation may well encourage linguistic features to be copied across
different languages to form subtly new varieties.
In the preface, Ingemar Strandvik discusses the frequent critical
remarks made about the readability and jargon of EU legislation, which
often receives the derogatory label of ‘Eurospeak’, despite the fact that
‘EU law works surprisingly well’ (vii). In opposition to such views, the
term ‘Eurolect’, first used by Goffin in 1990 (12), rejects the pejorative
connotations around the language used in EU texts. Indeed, this book
builds an argument that EU legal language does not differ solely in its
use of isolated ‘Europeisms’, but in fact displays much wider variation
on many linguistic levels in comparison to corresponding national legal
languages (13).
Each chapter provides an enlightening opening section on the
recent history of the language in question with regard to its
incorporation into the EU system, from original founding members to
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recent joiners, and then goes on to compare the language used in EU
directives to the language of national legislation which implements
them. In the chapter on Netherlandic Dutch (Chapter 3), Gert De
Sutter and Fee De Bock highlight the various lexical differences
between EU and national legislation. For instance, when addressing
issues around migrants, the EU texts have a ‘clear preference’ for the
term asielzoeker ‘asylum-seeker’, while the national legislation tends to
use the more stigmatising vreemdeling ‘stranger’ (55). To show that
these differences are not solely limited to terminology, they
demonstrate how the national legislation uses coherence marking more
frequently, thereby constituting variation in the discursive features
across the two varieties (60). Likewise, the study on German shows that
the EU variety contains many non-adapted loan-words, such as the
English term recycling in words like Recyclingbetriebe and
Recyclingmaterial, while the German national legislation contains
hardly any such occurrences (155). A great many English loanwords are
also identified in EU Polish, and English is shown to influence its
morphology and structure too.
Similar conclusions are reached across a whole range of
languages including Italian, Greek, Spanish, Finnish and French, as
the various contributors build a convincing body of evidence that the
EU varieties of these languages constitute genuinely distinct versions.
This appears to be largely due to the influence of English on these
languages, but the section on English itself also demonstrates that a
distinct English Eurolect has emerged, including loanwords and calques
from French such as vis-à-vis and competent authorities (74). Rather
than relying on the assumption that the prominence of English will be
the overwhelming factor in shaping these new language varieties,
Observing Eurolects clearly sets out a case that the complex
multilingual environment of the EU means that there are many, varied
sources and directions of influence behind the linguistic changes
identified. There does however seem to be some inconsistency around
the contributors’ views on whether this is a positive or negative
evolution. There has long been a debate in linguistics over whether the
changes brought about by language contact should be considered a kind
of contamination of the purity of a language, or simply an inevitable
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process of linguistic evolution. Although Observing Eurolects does not
address this debate directly, some contributors use the negatively-
loaded terms ‘interference’ (118) and ‘alienation’ (324), while others
point to the beneficial aspects of such contact-induced change, such as
the chapter on EU Italian, ‘which has been positively affected by
language contact in multilingual drafting: legislative texts written in
Italian Eurolect…are better responding to the need for a plain
legislative language’ (238). The book therefore does little to advance
this particular discussion in either direction.
Only two of the languages studied in the book, Maltese and
Latvian, fail to reach the conclusions that distinct EU varieties have
emerged, largely due to the fact that there was already large-scale
English influence on these languages in general, which could not be
specified as being EU-rooted. Indeed, given the recent political context,
the discussions in this book force the reader to consider the fate of EU
English itself within a post-Brexit European Union. Mori notes the
power of English within the institution, stating that by 2015 ‘81% of the
documents translated by the DGT of the Commission were originally
drafted in English’ (7); but will this power wane or will EU English
continue to diverge from its national legal variety?
Observing Eurolects is an engagingly written and innovative
study of contact-induced language change in the specific EU context. It
builds a strong argument that a new variety of legal language, known
as a Eurolect, has developed as a result of language contact within the
EU institutions. This hypothesis is supported by swathes of qualitative
and quantitative data which highlight the existence of these varieties,
obtained using a standardised methodology to allow the results across
all the languages in question to be compared on an equal footing. The
results can be practically applied to inform EU and national legal
drafting and translation in these languages in the future. This book is
ideal for readers with an interest in the interaction of language and
law, and anyone curious about the evolution of languages and the
intricacies of linguistic variation.
Edward Clay
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University of Birmingham
Wolfson Foundation Scholar
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