Attitudes towards Euro-English in a European Union Institution
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.13.2.131-152Keywords:
European Union institution, Euro-English, corpus linguistics, deviations from Standard English, attitudes towards language, EurojargonAbstract
This study deals with the attitudinal aspect of Euro-English, denoting a specific form of the English language that is frequently used within the institutions of the European Union. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 285 representatives who work for one of these institutions in Brussels. The respondents were asked to rate several deviations from Standard English, identified in a corpus-based analysis of EU texts, as either ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’ English usage. The findings reveal that the high acceptability rates of the proposed features among the non-native English-speaking respondents were mainly related to their proficiency in English and/or mother tongue interference. Moreover, since native speakers of English also accepted most of the proposed deviations, it follows that the participants did not seem to be aware of non-standardness in the test sentences. Euro-English must be regarded as EU jargon due to its technical, administrative or legal nature and not as a separate non-standard form of English for EU institutional settings.Metrics
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16. 12. 2016
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Copyright (c) 2016 Tina Balič

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
Balič, T. (2016). Attitudes towards Euro-English in a European Union Institution. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 13(2), 131-152. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.13.2.131-152