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Linguistic Landscape: Online-First Articles

‘Dear guest, pay for your language’. How accommodation rating and ownership effect language presence on the Online Linguistic Landscape

The case of Palma de Mallorca

ORCID logo | University of the Balearic Islands
The present paper draws on the concept of Online Linguistic Landscape (Kallen, Ní Dhonnacha & Wade, 2020) to explore code preference on hospitality websites at international tourist destinations. The analysis of a purpose-made database comprising the websites of all 254 accommodation establishments in Palma (Mallorca, Spain) reveals that although major tourist markets condition code presence on websites, the wide array of languages displayed does not correspond to the narrower catalogue of visiting nationalities. Beyond the strictly informative, websites have become effective promotion and sales tools, and marketability derived from vogue associations may mean that a language is listed on a website, even when other, more frequent guest languages are not. The scant online presence of Catalan, the autochthonous language of Mallorca, illustrates how, in mass tourism environments, minority languages are at the crossroads of succumbing to the demands of the market or submitting to processes of commodification of uncertain outcome.
Keywords: Online Linguistic Landscape, hospitality websites, tourism, Mallorca, regional languages, Catalan
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Online Linguistic Landscape
    • 2.2The OLL of tourism
      • 2.2.1The language of hotel websites
  • 3.Setting and method
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Code choice and preference in the OLL
    • 4.2Multilingual writing
    • 4.3Websites, hospitality rating and ownership
    • 4.4The case of Catalan
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The shaping of multilingual writing in the OLL of hospitality
    • 5.2Rating and ownership
    • 5.3Local minority languages: Catalan
  • 6.Conclusions and further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 September 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.23061.bru
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