The language of Tourism in the promotion of country villages: two case studies from Italy (Borghetto) and England (Bibury)

Abstract

In recent years experts in tourism field focused more attention on this phenomenon that carries many positive aspects, but also hard environmental, social and economic consequences. For this reason a new concept was introduced worldwide: the sustainable development in tourism field that aims to reach some goals such as economic efficiency, ecosystem integrity and social equity. The tourism exists as there is a must-see place to visit. Places become destinations through focused marketing actions that try to communicate the tourist product to the target. The thesis focuses on the promotion of a destination that is a crucial aspect to communicate the product to a specific target. In specific the paper analyses the language of tourism in promotional texts of two villages chosen as case studies. The village tourism is a type of niche tourism that tries to value small urban realities that otherwise would be abandoned. This phenomenon engaged many European countries that worked hard to preserve villages. The villages taken as example are: Borghetto in Italy and Bibury in England. The types of texts taken into account are brochures and websites where not only verbal techniques were analysed, but also visual one. At the same time it was possible to examine the interaction between visual and verbal techniques (multimodal analysis) especially for websites. Thanks to the two case studies it was possible to analyse the promotional aspect in the village tourism and valuate the differences between the destinations. The main goal was to examine the efficiency of the communicative aspect and to evaluate how much this is important to attract new tourists. At the end through this analysis were found not only strengths and weaknesses, but also possible developments for this kind of tourism.