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Observing Eurolects: Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in EU law
Edited by Laura Mori
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 86] 2018
► pp. 48–62

Chapter 3
Observing Eurolects

The case of Netherlandic Dutch

Building on the textual data in the Dutch part of Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus, consisting of 660 texts (3.7M words) in corpus A (directives) and 504 texts (4M tokens) in corpus B (implementation laws), we investigate the extent to which the language of European directives shines through in (Netherlandic) Dutch national law. In order to do so, we extracted several EU-rooted phenomena, contact-induced features, and intralinguistic variants and analyzed the distribution of these features by means of bivariate and multivariate statistics, so as to discern meaningful patterns in the data. The results enable us to determine whether Dutch implementation law exhibits linguistic traces of the so-called Eurolect. The results show similarities between national law implementations and EU directives as well as differences. One of the most striking patterns that emerge across different language domains (lexicon, morphosyntax, discourse) is that implementation laws contain much more formal linguistic features, thereby ignoring clear writing recommendations.

Keywords: Eurolect, Netherlandic Dutch, formality, coherence marking, correspondence regression
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The contemporary political and linguistic situation in The Netherlands
  • 3.The case of Dutch in EU translation
  • 4.Data and methodology
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Distribution of lexical features
    • 5.2Distribution of morphosyntactic features
    • 5.3Distribution of discursive features
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.86.03des
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Clay, Edward & Karen Mcauliffe
2021. Reconceptualising the Third Space of Legal Translation: A Study of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Comparative Legilinguistics 45:1 ► pp. 93 ff. DOI logo
Mori, Laura & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2021. Mapping Eurolects. Languages in Contrast 21:2 ► pp. 186 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Soziolinguistische Bibliographie europäischer Länder für 2018Sociolinguistic Bibliography of European Countries for 2018Bibliographie sociolinguistique des pays européens pour 2018. Sociolinguistica 34:1 ► pp. 277 ff. DOI logo

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