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Two Italian legal languages: origins and status

One language, two legal orders

Legal language is the language of a legal order before it is the language of a people. Every legal system creates its own concepts, gives them names and fixes their meaning through statutes, case law and doctrine. Where two states share a language, they therefore share a vocabulary without sharing its legal content. Lawyers know the phenomenon from English, which serves the common law of England, the mixed systems of Scotland and South Africa and the federal and state laws of the United States, and from German, which serves the legal orders of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Italian is used as a legal language by the Italian Republic, by the Swiss Confederation and the Cantons of Ticino and Graubünden, by the Republic of San Marino and by the Vatican City State, as well as in the European Union, where it is one of the twenty-four official languages. Between the Italian of Rome and the Italian of Berne and Bellinzona the divergence is greater than between most pairs of related legal languages, because the Swiss Italian vocabulary arose as a translation of codes conceived in another language.

The Italian Republic legislates in Italian for about 59 million inhabitants and has a codified private law whose core, the Codice civile of 1942, unites civil and commercial law in one code. Its Code of Civil Procedure dates from 1940, its criminal code from 1930 and its Code of Business Crisis and Insolvency from 2019.1 Switzerland legislates in three equally authentic language versions. Article 14(1) of the Publications Act states in its Italian version that "per gli atti normativi, ciascuna delle tre versioni è vincolante" (for enactments, each of the three versions is binding).2 Italian is the main language of only about 8 per cent of the Swiss population, a share that the Federal Statistical Office reports as having declined from 11 per cent in 1970.3 The federal Italian legal text is therefore produced for a minority by a small team of translators and jurist-linguists, while the Italian Republic produces its own legal language for a large state with its own universities, courts and doctrinal tradition. The two languages influence each other only marginally.

Translation from German and French and the federal workshop

The great federal codifications were drafted in German, with French close behind. The Swiss Civil Code of 10 December 1907 was the work of Eugen Huber, who wrote in German. The Code of Obligations of 30 March 1911 was revised in the same period and integrated into the Civil Code as its fifth book. The Italian versions were translations, prepared under time pressure for a canton that had its own civil code until 1912 and whose lawyers had been trained largely at Italian universities.4 The translators faced a choice that shaped Swiss Italian legal language for a century. They could borrow the terminology of the Italian Codice civile of 1865 and the Codice di commercio of 1882, accepting that the Italian words carried Italian concepts. Alternatively, they could coin or adapt terms to fit the Swiss concepts precisely. In practice they did both, producing the mixture of borrowed, adapted and invented terms that this chapter describes.5

Today the Italian versions of federal enactments are prepared by the Italian Division of the Central Language Services of the Federal Chancellery and by the translation services of the departments. The Federal Chancellery publishes its own Istruzioni della Cancelleria federale per la redazione dei testi ufficiali in italiano, updated most recently on 15 December 2025, an Italian edition of the Guida di legislazione (2019) and recommendations on the use of anglicisms.6 The terminology that these services fix is collected in TERMDAT, the multilingual terminology database of the federal administration, which contains about 400,000 entries in German, French, Italian, Romansh and English and is maintained by the Terminology Section of the Federal Chancellery.7 The Italian federal texts have improved considerably since the 1970s, when the practice of joint drafting (coredazione) in the parliamentary drafting committees began to give the Italian version a voice before adoption. Chapter J.I describes this institutional framework in detail.8

Notes

  1. Codice civile, approved by Regio Decreto 16 marzo 1942, n. 262 (Brocardi.it, "Codice civile", https://www.brocardi.it/codice-civile/); Codice di procedura civile, Regio Decreto 28 ottobre 1940, n. 1443 (Brocardi.it, "Codice di procedura civile", https://www.brocardi.it/codice-di-procedura-civile/); Codice penale, Regio Decreto 19 ottobre 1930, n. 1398 (Brocardi.it, "Codice penale", https://www.brocardi.it/codice-penale/). The Code of Business Crisis and Insolvency is Decreto legislativo 12 gennaio 2019, n. 14, cited in its Art. 121 by Brocardi.it, "Art. 121 Codice della crisi d'impresa e dell'insolvenza – Presupposti della liquidazione giudiziale", https://www.brocardi.it/codice-crisi-impresa/parte-prima/titolo-v/capo-i/sezione-i/art121.html. ↩
  2. Federal Act of 18 June 2004 on the Compilations of Federal Legislation and the Federal Gazette (Publications Act, PublA), SR 170.512, Art. 14(1); Italian title Legge sulle pubblicazioni ufficiali (LPubb), text at https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-it/1/17/170.512-14-19.html. ↩
  3. Federal Statistical Office (FSO), "Lingue", https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/it/home/statistiche/popolazione/lingue-religioni/lingue.html (Italian, including Ticinese and Italo-Grisons dialects, as main language: 11 % in 1970, 8 % in 2020). ↩
  4. On the Ticinese civil code of 1837 and its revision of 1882, which remained in force until the Swiss Civil Code entered into force on 1 January 1912, see the articles on codification in the Dizionario storico della Svizzera. ↩
  5. Jean-Luc Egger, Angela Ferrari and Letizia Lala (eds.), Le forme linguistiche dell'ufficialità. ↩
  6. Federal Chancellery, "Documentazione per la redazione di testi ufficiali", https://www.bk.admin.ch/it/documentazione-per-la-redazione-di-testi-ufficiali; Federal Chancellery, "Strumenti per la redazione e la traduzione di testi", https://www.bk.admin.ch/bk/it/home/dokumentation/sprachen/hilfsmittel-textredaktion.html. ↩
  7. Federal Chancellery, "TERMDAT", https://www.bk.admin.ch/bk/it/home/dokumentation/sprachen/termdat.html; database at https://www.termdat.bk.admin.ch/search. ↩
  8. Federal Chancellery, "Lingue", https://www.bk.admin.ch/bk/it/home/dokumentation/sprachen.html (Divisione italiana dei Servizi linguistici centrali). The beginnings of systematic co-drafting in the 1970s are given from general knowledge. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.

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