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Research on EU Finnish

The Insititute for the Languages of Finland conducts research on EU Finnish from various angles in order to provide information basis for its plain language work and for authorities and translators. Among the investigated topics are attitudes towards and perceptions of EU Finnish, the process of transposition and the morphology, phraseology and vocabulary of EU Finnish.

Attitudes and perceptions

Two surveys on the Finnish officials’ use of languages in EU working groups and their perceptions of Finnish used in EU legislation and other texts were conducted in 1998 and 2006-2007. A third survey will follow in 2018.

Comparisons of EU Finnish and national language of law

The Institute for the Languages of Finland compiled a small corpus in 2003–2006 of laws enacted from government bills to implement Directives, and of the associated Directives. The corpus has been structured and morphologically analyzed.  A comparison of grammatical forms revealed few but telling differences between the usage of national and EU Finnish. The corpus was also used to locate citations from directives to Finnish laws by using identical or very similar n-grams. It turned out that most multiple-word citations were modified by the Finnish legal drafters, who adjusted the borrowed text to requirements of Finnish legal style.

Read articles based on the Institute's corpus 

Eurolect Observatory

The Eurolect Observatory Project was set up in 2013 to investigate the existence of eurolects, separate varieties of legal language in nine languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Eurolects. Its research material was a parallel corpus of over 600 directives and corresponding national laws in each of the participating languages. The Institute for the Languages of Finland is a part of the Finnish team. A book presenting the results of the first phase will be published in 2018.

  • Eurolect Observatory Project