Migration terminology in the EU Institutions

Abstract

‘Migration’ has recently become a single domain for specialized terminology in the European Union, linked to the crisis which has been rapidly unfolding in Europe since 2015. The migration crisis, with the dramatic increase in arrivals of migrants in Europe, has highlighted the uncertainty of institutional classifications used to describe and manage migration flows. What is a migrant in the EU Institutions and how is the term refugee or asylum seeker respectively classified? The present study delves into Migration from a terminological perspective and investigates how migrants have been mirrored through terminology in institutional texts from 1950 to 2016 by analyzing two sets of corpora: the European Migration Network glossaries (EMN) of the European Commission and the EU database of official legislative text, EUR-lex EN 2/16. This paper aims to show how migration phenomena can be narrated through the lens of terminology and how term choice plays a vital role in making an impact in the representation of migrants and refugees in political institutions and society.