A corpus-based quantitative analysis of German legal language: linguistic features and implications for accessibility

Abstract The legal language has been extensively studied due to its profound and far-reaching impact on society. Among the various research areas, the complexity of legal language has received particular attention due to its implications for legal practice and societal access to justice. Relevant studies seek to identify the factors contributing to the difficulty of legal language and explore potential methods of simplification. However, despite extensive qualitative research, a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the essential linguistic features distinguishing legal language from everyday language remains underexplored. The present study fills this gap and quantitatively examines the key features of German legal language by comparing it to journalistic language as a benchmark for everyday discourse, providing a rigorous, corpus-based perspective on the lexical, syntactic, and typological features of legal texts. Using data from the HDT-UD and DGT-UD treebanks, the study analyzes 18 quantitative indicators across three linguistic domains – lexicon, syntax, and word-order typology. The results indicate that legal language is characterized by a limited vocabulary, a higher frequency of long words and dependent clauses, increased syntactic and structural complexity, and a predominance of SV and OV word order patterns. By providing a detailed comparison of legal and journalistic registers, this study advances the understanding of legal language through objective, empirical analysis. The findings have practical implications for legal communication, suggesting that greater attention to lexical simplification and syntactic clarity could improve accessibility and comprehension.