Traces of Eurolect in Swiss Legal Italian? A corpus analysis of the CHEU-Lex Corpus

In the multilingual environment of the European Union, laws are drafted in a lingua franca, usually English or French, and then translated into the other EU official languages. In this scenario, the Eurolect Observatory Project discussed the possible existence Eurolects, i.e. linguistic legal varieties born within the European framework and characterized by a set of linguistic features. Since the Swiss Confederation interacts with the EU through the bilateral agreements, Swiss legal Italian might present some European linguistic features. This thesis discusses whether any relevant influence of the European legal drafting process can be observed in the Italian of Swiss laws of implementation. To test this hypothesis, data were extracted from the Italian CHEU-Lex sub-corpus, i.e. the Italian corpus of Swiss laws of implementation. The corpus was built as part of a wider project led by Professor Annarita Felici with the aim of providing a multilingual resource to investigate the influence of EU drafting and translational process. Following the same analysis carried out during the Eurolect Observatory Project, results obtained from the CHEU-Lex Corpus were compared to those obtained from the two Italian corpora previously analyzed in the Eurolect Observatory Project: Corpus A, i.e. the corpus of Italian EU directives, and Corpus B, i.e. the corpus of Italian laws of implementation. Results underlined traces of the influence of the European legal drafting process in the CHEU-Lex Corpus. However, they did not provide convincing evidence confirming a strong presence of traces of Eurolect in Swiss legal Italian. To better understand if these traits are the result of the influence of the European legal drafting process or if, instead, they are observed in the CHEU-Lex Corpus for reasons other than European contact, it would be necessary to carry out further analysis, comparing the CHEU-Lex Corpus with a corpus of Italian Swiss laws unrelated to the EU context.