Legislation is characterized by a high degree of linguistic conservatism. So, despite existing EU and national guidelines, inclusive choices are still limited in legislation at both levels. An introduction to the topic of gender in language and in legal language opens the volume, focusing on the EU dimension and on the language policies of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. In the following, five sociolinguistic contexts are described, and three Romance, and two Germanic linguistic traditions are compared through qualitative and quantitative corpus analyses based on the same corpora and consistent methodological guidelines. These studies aim at highlighting the presence or absence of a gender-neutral language in European and national laws.

Stefania Cavagnoli is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at Università di Roma Tor Vergata and director of her University's Language Center. Laura Mori is associate professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Interpreting and Translation of the Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma (UNINT) where she teaches Sociolinguistics and Text Linguistics and Pragmatic.