0000000000183141
AUTHOR
Ornella Guarino
English Language and European Union: A Corpus-Based Study of EU Secondary Legislation
To this date, English is one of the working languages of the EU and, most importantly, it is the ‘de facto’ lingua franca of the EU, as the source language of most European documents is mainly English (Crystal 2017). Despite Brexit, English remains the most studied language in Europe (Kużelewska 2020), not to mention the fact that it is the language of globalization. However, the UK’s exit from the EU prompts the question as to what will be the development of English in the post-Brexit landscape. In light of this, the present article aims at conducting a linguistic analysis of Euro-English in order to assess if and how such type of English differs from the Standard English (SE). If yes, is…
Gender-neutral Language in EU Secondary Legislation: The Case of the English Language
English does not have a grammatical gender, thus having an “intrinsic predisposition towards gender-neutral forms” (Poddighe 2020, 3). Most personal nouns do not indicate a specific gender, as in the case of person or engineer. However, there are also personal nouns with lexical gender, such as king or queen (Hellinger 2001). As a result, in English there is a risk of creating sentences that are not gender-neutral. Within the EU, the promotion of the use of a more inclusive language represents an important objective. For this reason, in recent years, various documents containing guidelines on gender-neutral language have been elaborated to encourage members of the EU institutions to adopt a…