Linguistic features of Vietnamese legal language: a study of court documents (2020–2025)

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic features of Vietnamese legal texts. The analysis draws on a corpus of 150 court documents issued between 2020 and 2025 (533,912 word tokens): criminal verdicts, civil judgments, administrative rulings, and decisions of the Supreme People’s Court’s Judicial Council. Previous Vietnamese studies focused mainly on lexical errors in court verdicts (2011) or on legal terminology in normative texts. This study instead treats court documents as an independent genre and analyzes them along three dimensions. The first is vocabulary: Sino-Vietnamese terminology, internal register-switching, and formulaic language. The second is genre structure: an eight-move obligatory schema, identified here for the first time in Vietnamese court documents through Swales and Bhatia’s genre theory. The third is pragmatics: performative speech acts, subject anonymization as a power strategy, gradience of epistemic modality, and a four-group system of legal euphemism serving distinct legal principles. Together, these features form what can be called the “legal tone” of Vietnamese court documents. The findings contribute to Vietnamese legal linguistics and carry practical implications for legal education, public legal communication, and legal translation.