Mapping Legal Language Studies Across Legal Families: A Comparative Bibliometric Analysis

Amid accelerating juridical globalization and digital textual proliferation, systematic knowledge of how legal-language scholarship is conditioned by divergent legal traditions remains fragmentary. This study provides a large-scale, cross-family bibliometric map of legal language research spanning civil-law, common-law, Islamic-law, and Chinese systems (4,311 aggregate records 1976–2024). Records from Web of Science, Scopus, and CNKI were screened using a PRISMA reporting framework and cleaned and analyzed through a complementary toolkit: R bibliometrix for descriptive indicators, VOSviewer for collaboration and keyword co-occurrence networks, CiteSpace for time-zone and burst detection, and Python for data harmonization and reproducible validation. Findings reveal distinct jurisprudential imprints on scholarship within each legal family, evident in keyword co-occurrence, journal landscapes, and citation patterns. While civil law emphasizes terminological harmonization and multilingualism, common law focuses on courtroom discourse and forensic pragmatics. Islamic law scholarship centers on scriptural language and translation ethics, and Chinese law studies highlight codification rhetoric and bilingual dissemination. Despite these systemic divergences, there is a discernible convergence towards computational linguistics and AI, albeit with adoption pathways reflecting each tradition’s unique priorities. Within its database and language boundaries, this study provides an evidence-based map of legal-language scholarship, highlighting the interplay between doctrinal traditions and global scholarly trends.