Disseminating Statistics in Europe: the Language Perspective

This study provides information on the state of the art of the language used for disseminating statistics in Europe by means of a corpus of English National Statistical Yearbooks of EU member countries and Eurostat(ENSY). The study proposes an investigation on the language of statistics so far little explored but topical, due to the wide use of statistics in many fields (e.g. economics, social phenomena, lifestyles, policies etc.). The use of ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) has facilitated communication among statisticians in the EU enabling direct exchange among members of the same discourse Community (Swales 2004), and not only. Thanks to the English translations of national statistical publications, all the educated European citizens have access to statistics, which are now freely accessible on the web. This fact is leading to new language strategies and to an increasing use of ELF for statistics intercultural communication.