Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explore diachronically the features of legal language in British legislation over a period of 200 years to find out whether the features identified by Crystal and Davy in their seminal work are still present in current British legislation and whether any changes can be attributed to plain language efforts. Further, the paper explores lexical diversity and readability.
For these purposes, five corpora of British legislation were compiled from 1820, 1870, 1920, 1970, and 2020. The results show that the current language of British legislation is very different from the legal language described by Crystal and Davy fifty years ago.
The plainer texts tend to be lexically less diverse. The readability measures provide rather inconclusive results.