Observing Eurolects Network (OEN)

The research group Observing Eurolects Network (OEN) represents a continuation of the Eurolect Observatory Project (EOP), directed by the professor Laura Mori. The activities of the EOP have been carried out in two phases: the first phase (2013-2016) aimed at verifying and/or confirming the existence of 11 EU legislative varieties – the so-called Eurolects – that originated and established themselves within the linguistic diasystems of (some) EU Member States. During this phase the project benefited from the funding received from the UNINT University Research Commission (CRA) and from the financial support of the European Commission, which co-financed two initiatives within the framework of the Translating Europe Workshops. At the end of the first phase, the volume Observing Eurolects. Corpus analysis of linguistic variation in EU law, edited by Laura Mori, was published by Benjamins. At the same time, the first results of the project were disseminated at meetings and conferences attended by EOP members (see section “Dissemination events”). 

The second phase of the project (2017-2020) involved individual and group work in the following fields of study: jurilinguistics, sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, textual and pragmatic linguistics, terminology, translation-oriented contrastive studies, and statistical analysis of language variation.  
It involved 30 members from 22 universities or research institutions based in several European countries. Thanks to the funding granted by the CRA, it was possible to expand the Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus by adding the following corpora to the A and B corpora collected during the first phase:

• corpus C, consisting of national laws with no relation to EU legislation, available for Greek, English, Italian, Polish, Spanish, German;
• corpus D, composed of legislative varieties of languages that are official languages in several EU Member States or in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland) and compiled thanks to the funding obtained by Annarita Felici (Université de Genève) for the project “Eurolect Observatory: Looking for Eurolect footprints in the Swiss Legislation”.

The research activities focused in particular on the following thematic areas:

• gender-inclusive language issues;
• geographical variability in the legislative varieties of different European countries (including non-EU Member States);
• intra-linguistic variation between EU, EU-derived and national law;
• language contact and convergence phenomena in Eurolects;
• improvement of legislative quality for greater inclusion and accessibility;
• discursive construction of European identity in primary law.

As can be seen from the list of publications (see section “Focus on Eurolects“) and presentations (see section “Dissemination events“) given at national and international conferences. 
In its seven years of activity, the Project has brought about the creation and consolidation of an international network, which is going to persist after the conclusion of the second phase thanks to the research group called Observing Eurolects Network (OEN). It aims to serve as a point of reference for anyone working on Eurolect/s, with approaches and methods that may involve one or more disciplines (legal, textual, pragmatic and contact linguistics; sociolinguistics; terminology; translation-oriented contrastive studies; linguistic variation, investigated through statistical analysis; corpus linguistics). Researchers (see section “Members“) from 12 European universities and one Italian research centre participate in the Group (last update: April 2021). 

In particular, the OEN pursues the following objectives:

• giving prominence to research activities on Eurolects, both currently underway and those to come;
• encouraging the emergence of new research projects, either individual or joint;
• starting collaborations with new partners active in the same field of investigation and maintaining the existing ones, such as the fruitful interaction between Laura Mori and the Institute of Computational Linguistics “Antonio Zampolli” in Pisa; the collaboration with the research group coordinated by Annarita Felici in Geneva; the exchange of information with the research group directed by Łucja Biel (“The Eurolect: an EU variant of Polish and its impact on administrative Polish“); the support provided by Fabio Proia to the research unit directed by Daniel Leisser that will study the relationship between the German Eurolect and the Austrian legislative variety;
• fostering and consolidating the fundamental link established between scholars working in different academic institutions and research bodies;
• maintaining an open channel of communication with the European institutions, which have contributed so much to the achievement of the objectives in the two phases of the EOP;
• collecting and disseminating information on research products, both those already published and those to be produced in the future, focusing on one or more Eurolects. To this end, an ad hoc section, “Focus on Eurolects”, has been created, in which all news about new publications, conferences or research projects on the subject are collected. Among the members of the Group, Fabio Proia is the contact person to whom useful information can be sent for the continuous updating of this section. Focus on Eurolects aims to represent a virtual space of exchange and dissemination for those interested in this interdisciplinary field of research.