Abstract
Professionals tend to consider English as the lingua franca of museum communication; likewise, linguists have mostly explored museum discourse from an English, monolingual perspective. Yet few studies have questioned whether contents in English can actually engage linguistically diverse groups in inclusive ways. The issue is particularly relevant in the multilingual environment of South Tyrol, a northern Italian province with a large number of museums. Drawing on frameworks for the analysis of multilingual texts, this paper investigates multilingual practices in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) of South Tyrolean museums. The following research questions are asked: which languages are used on websites and social network sites (SNS) of South Tyrolean museums? What role does English play in establishing relationships with multicultural audiences? Multilingual practices in the CMC of South Tyrolean museums are quite diversified in terms of mode and arrangement of content. One in three museum websites does not have an English version, whereas less than half of the SNS in use feature content in English. The quality of Web translations and the use of code-switching highlight the shortcomings of English compared to local languages, especially when it comes to expressing culture-bound concepts, whereas in SNS English content is often reduced to an eye-grabbing device. These results invite further investigation from an ethnographic perspective in order to clarify whether ideological reasons, as well as technical constraints, may hinder the use of English in the CMC of South-Tyrolean museums.