A linguistic analysis of the official tourism websites of the seventeen Spanish Autonomous Communities

The aim of this paper is to research the linguistic strategies used in the official tourism websites of the seventeen Spanish Autonomous Communities for destination management, marketing and branding. The seventeen webpages have been assessed through the analysis of persuasive linguistic techniques and thematic lingo. Based on content and discourse analysis, a specialised synchronic corpus of texts in Spanish and their parallel texts in English was created, and a census reached. Interactional metadiscoursal markers uncovered rhetorical and persuasive means of promotion and communication, while specificities of the tourism discourse were broached through terminology. Moreover, transcreation is considered an indispensable linguistic tool for the internationalisation of the destinations. The abundance of interpersonal metadiscursive markers and thematic lexicon in the corpus led to the assumption that the target tourism discourse is used as a means of informing but primarily persuading the tourist, thus, conceptualising language as catalyst to tourism promotion.