The influence of Anglicisms on tourism language: A comparative study of Italian and Spanish hotel and airport websites

Globalisation has profoundly changed the world by creating an increasingly interconnected and multicultural society. This process has had a significant impact on the linguistic panorama due to the rapprochement of cultures that has accelerated linguistic evolution and has made languages more prone to external influences. In particular, English, due to its prestige role as a lingua franca, exercises a strong impact on other languages through the spread of Anglicisms. This diffusion has affected several languages including Italian and Spanish, influencing both colloquial and specialised registers such as tourism language. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the influence of Anglicisms in tourism language, comparing their impact on Italian and Spanish in order to understand similarities and differences in terms of both frequency and usage, by focusing on hotel and airport sectors. Tourism language was chosen as the focus of this research because the majority of tourism communication is conducted online and as a result, this has facilitated the diffusion of Anglicisms. In addition, compared to other specialised languages, tourism language is considered less relevant and therefore there are few studies carried out on this specialised language. With this study, I would like to address this gap and encourage further studies in this field. In order to conduct the study I collected 15 Italian and 15 Spanish hotel websites and created two parallel corpora. I then selected three websites of the major Italian airports and one Spanish airport website used as representative due to the impossibility of distinguishing Spanish airport websites due to their uniformity. Then, I transcribed and created two distinct and parallel corpora for the Italian and Spanish airport languages as well. Finally, I collected three English hotel websites and three American hotel websites and created a final corpus used as a reference corpus. The results of the study reveal that Anglicisms are more frequent in Italian than in Spanish. Furthermore, the results show that Spanish tends to adapt Anglicisms to its orthographic rules, in contrast to Italian where Anglicisms are prevalent in their original form and their substitutions are not frequently used. Finally, the study reveals that in both languages, Anglicisms occur for commercial reasons as well as out of necessity.