Mapping Eurolects: An aggregate perspective on similarities between legislative varieties

Based on the description of EU legislative varieties covering EU directives and theirnational laws of implementation in 11 languages, we are interested in the extent towhich Eurolects are similar to each other, above and beyond trivial genealogicalsimilarities. We thus utilise a variation-oriented aggregative analysis technique toaddress these questions: (a)What is the precise extent to which Eurolects are similar toeach other? (b)Are similarities predicted by extra-linguistic affinities? (c)Do factors suchas EU accession dates and language policy play a role in shaping the Eurolectclusters? Our methodology starts out from a meticulously catalogued list of corpusbasedlexical and grammatical features. Based on the observed presence or absenceof these features, we calculate in a second step aggregate linguistic distances betweenall of the Eurolects. In step three, we use a well-established technique such asMultidimensional Scaling to visualize and interpret the Eurolect landscape.