“Observing Eurolects. The case of Spanish”

This chapter aims to establish whether or not the legislative Spanish used in the European Union can be considered a different linguistic variety compared to the legislative variety used in national transposition measures. The study was carried out by performing a comparative analysis of a corpus of EU directives and the corresponding Spanish implementing measures. A quantitative approach was used along with qualitative observations in order to highlight characteristic features at several linguistic levels (lexical, morphological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and textual). The results enable us to identify a Spanish Eurolect as a distinct linguistic variety, which tends to make use of a less marked register and more standardised patterns and contains fewer typical features of legal discourse.