THE ILLUSION OF NEUTRALITY IN LEGAL ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/folium/2026.9.29Keywords:
English as a legal lingua franca, legal discourse, convergence and conflict, linguistic neutrality, common law and civil law, contract interpretation, ESP pedagogyAbstract
This article analyses linguistic neutrality in legal English as a lingua franca. It examines two dynamics of transnational legal discourse that operate at once: the convergence of linguistic form and the conflict over doctrinal content. Conventional English drafting formulae, reused as templates, are analysed to show the mechanism that produces an appearance of neutrality. The aim is to define how the standardisation of legal English creates an impression of neutrality that its own doctrinal effects do not support. Three tasks follow. The first integrates research on English as a legal lingua franca, on interference in legal translation, and on the critique of neutrality in international arbitration into a single analytical framework. The second applies that framework to three common-law concepts routinely written into contracts governed by civil law: the entire agreement clause together with the parol evidence rule, consideration, and the duty of good faith in performance. The third sets out what the framework means for teaching English for Specific Purposes and legal English. The methods are critical discourse analysis, after Fairclough, and the functional comparative method, after Merryman and Pérez Perdomo. The analysis supports the following conclusions. Standardised English drafting forms converge across jurisdictions at the level of linguistic surface, while the doctrine they are assumed to carry stays anchored in the common law that produced them. Divergence forms a gradient: a recital of consideration remains inert under civil-law governing law, an entire agreement clause is weakened or displaced, and a duty of good faith may be read in despite the silence of the text. This decoupling of formal from doctrinal convergence sustains the illusion of neutrality. The claim that its interpretive costs fall unevenly is offered as a hypothesis for empirical testing, not as an established finding. Neutrality, then, is an artefact of standardisation rather than a property of English as a medium, which makes contrastive doctrinal literacy inseparable from terminological and generic competence in legal English curricula.
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