Eurolect Observatory Project

The research activities envisaged by the project are carried out by the Eurolect Observatory research group within the Department of Interpreting and Translation (FIT) of the Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT.

The first phase involved 19 scholars from 11 European institutions (Institute for the Languages of Finland, Ionian University, Ghent University, Université Paris Diderot, Université de Nantes, University of Malta, University of Warsaw, Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT; University of Tampere, Ventspils University College) towards a common objective with the adoption of a shared research framework in order to establish the existence or non-existence of European legislative varieties (eurolects) different from the varieties in use in national legislations (see Mori, Ed., 2018).

The second phase of the project involves 29 members from 21 institutions engaged in research activities in the following thematic areas:

1. gender issues;
2. geographical variability in the legislative varieties of different European countries (including non-EU countries);
3. intra-linguistic variation in the transposition of directives;
4. intra-textual variation in supranational and national legislative varieties and by textual genres;
5. terminological studies;
6. linguistic contact and convergence phenomena in eurolects;
7. improving legislative quality for greater inclusion and accessibility;
8. indexicality and identity in European and national treaties;
9. evolution in the role of English in the EU context;
10. linguistic development of Eurolects in the pre- and post-accession (for the most recent accession Member States).

At the same time, the Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus is being expanded in order to include, based on needs diversified by language and research topic, the following additional corpora:

• corpus C: corpus of national laws without no relation to EU legislation (currently available for English, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Spanish);
• corpus D: legislative varieties of EU languages ​​that are official languages ​​in several Member States or in other non-EU European countries such as Switzerland;
• corpus E: diachronic expansion, in particular for the most recent accession countries whose legislative variety has been particularly subject to massive translation work of thecommunity acquis in the pre-accession phase or for countries whose linguistic status is being redefined, such as English;
• corpus F: other sources of EU law (such as regulations, case law or collections of treaties) representing other legal genres.