Legal Language – A Multidimensional Approach (Enghish version)

The language of the law has long exerted its spell on most people who enter into contact with it, be that lawyers, legislators, magistrates, linguists, translators or just the “laypeople”, as the professionals in the legal field prefer to call the uninitiated. As a result of the interaction of two major fields of knowledge, law and linguistics, legal language has been at the heart of extensive works pertaining to specialists in both fields, and has generated a diversity of approaches and discussions, starting from the very name given to this specialised language (legal language, the language of the law, language for law purposes etc.) and continuing with debates whether this language needs to be simplified so that everybody can have access to the ‘letter of the law’ or remain encrypted and thus less prone to change and interpretation (the Plain English Campaign).