Multilingualism and international tourism: a content- and discourse-based approach to language-related judgments in web 2.0 hotel reviews

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis corpus-based study examines whether and how German-, French- and Spanish-speaking tourists refer to language experiences when they write an online hotel review (specifically of hotels situated in Dutch-speaking Flanders, Belgium). We find that language is indeed an issue in hotel reviews, but to varying degrees according to the language group of the tourists. French and especially Spanish-speaking tourists refer far more frequently to language experiences, and in particular to the use of their mother tongue, than German-speaking tourists. According to the ‘face model of language choice’, this means that French- and Spanish-speaking tourists emphasize more explicitly their ‘ethnolinguistic face’ than German-speaking tourists. Also, the positive–negative polarity of the judgments differs, with Spanish-speaking tourists at the most positive pole, and French-speaking tourists at the most negative pole. Furthermore, the data also reveal that the use of the mother tongue of the tourist and the use of an international link language (by default, English) are functionally different options, and that the use of English even may lead to face-threatening situations. By comparing the data with staff-related judgments and hotel ratings, it is shown that language plays a specific and independent role in the hotel reviews.