Seminar: Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) of the Polish Eurolect and National Varieties of Administrative Language

On April 27, 2026, Łucja Biel, Katarzyna Wasilewska, and Dariusz Koźbiał (Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw) will give a talk titled “Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) of the Polish Eurolect and National Varieties of Administrative Language: Dimensions of Variation”. The seminar will be held in Polish and is available online at zil.ipipan.waw.pl/seminarium-online.

The aim of the talk is to present the results of a full Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) of the Polish Eurolect compared with the national variety of Polish administrative language. The Eurolect is a linguistic hybrid shaped by the institutional conditions of the European Union, including multilingualism and translation. The study uses a corpus covering key genres of institutional communication: legal acts, judgments, administrative reports, and websites addressed to citizens.

The analysis identified four dimensions of variation: 1) argumentation vs. information, 2) engaging instruction vs. distanced authority, 3) prescriptiveness vs. narration, and 4) lexical richness. The results point to significant differences in the communicative styles of supranational and national institutions. EU legal acts and judgments are characterised by greater prescriptiveness, denser networks of references, and stronger argumentation compared with their Polish counterparts. EU institutional websites show lower levels of audience engagement and argumentation, while EU reports are characterised by a less distanced style. The findings make it possible to visualise the variation among institutional genres, as well as the similarities and differences between institutional communication at the EU and national levels, and thus to better understand the specificity of the Polish Eurolect.