Abstract
Over the last decades, international organizations have shown an increasing commitment to the critical challenge of promoting sustainable forms of tourism. As a consequence, the tourism industry has set out to develop a product range based on principles such as economic fairness, positive sociocultural impacts and environmental-friendliness (GSTC, 2023). Delving deeper into the language of sustainable tourism can be an opportunity to improve the ability to address the challenges and opportunities associated with achieving sustainability within the tourism industry. Yet, discourse and communication studies focusing on sustainable tourism are relatively rare (Malavasi, 2017;
Tölkes, 2018; Tiago et al., 2021; Pato et al., 2021). As part of an ongoing research project on English as an international language for tourism in South Tyrol, this paper aims at framing the notion of sustainability in the tourism sector in the Italian Autonomous Province of Bolzano by investigating the communicative strategies in use to promote sustainability in the digital discourse about tourism. The study draws on a combined methodology, relying on ethnography, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. It is based on interviews with tourism communicators and a corpus of sustainability-related texts collected from web pages of local accommodation facilities. The analysis focuses on the verbal representation of the landscape; it addresses space and place description within a range of different contexts and concentrates on the role played by indexicality and evaluative language. Interviews revealed that the Covid-19 pandemic became an opportunity to reshape the tourism culture and design a new development strategy with the concept of sustainability as its pillar. In a region where nature is a dominant element as well as a resource for the tourism sector, sustainability becomes an intrinsic value, rather than the result of the implementation of international policies. Language highlights how the local community embraces the notion of sustainability as a defining trait of their local identity.