Introduction. The Eurolect Observatory Project

This chapter presents the research framework of the Eurolect Observatory Project. The starting hypothesis of this research project is that language contact through translation of EU legislation has resulted in the creation and dissemination of standardised lexical variants, structural features and textual patterns in many EU official and working languages. The Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus was compiled to make it possible to describe such features in eleven legislative languages. The corpus enabled the research team to collect evidence of language in use in order to confirm/disconfirm the existence of a macro-variety of legal language – known as Eurolect – generated in the context of the EU legislative multilingual drafting process. A common research template was developed and adopted by all the researchers in their respective chapters, to categorise results obtained from the corpus via a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches.