• Overview
• Research Platforms
• Thematic Area A: Language, Identity and Culture
• WP 1a: Europeanisation and the reshaping of cultural tourism and cultural industry
• WP 2a: Promoting national identity internationally
• WP 3a: Politics and strategies of identity in multicultural European cities
• Thematic Area B: Language Policy and Planning
• Thematic Area C: Multilingualism and Education
• Thematic Area D: Language and Economy
• Communication, Management, Infrastructure, Training and Gender

WP 2a: Promoting national identity internationally

Summary Results

Promoting National Identity Internationally

Cultural diversity as well as natural beauties are very well reflected in texts for tourists going to Croatia, Cyprus and Poland. These texts are published in several languages and there seems to be a trend to add new languages to the existing offer. Tourism boards seem to adjust the languages they use according to the increase of certain tourist groups.
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Rationale

In the contemporary world more and more countries are making strenuous efforts to present themselves as desirable destinations for foreign visitors. In order to be visible on the global market, these countries undertake various promotional activities by using linguistic and visual means such as slogans, logos, photographs and promotional films. In doing so, they draw not only on the pre-existent resources in rural and urban landscapes to be represented in promotional materials, but also on the public discourses implemented in creating and maintaining the national identity.

Objective

This work package aims at identifying, revealing and analyzing various representational strategies such as selection, inclusion and exclusion the countries in question (Croatia and Cyprus) use to develop their specific identity on the global tourism market, with a special focus on the ways and extent to which linguistic and intracultural variation within single nations is conveyed to across different cultural systems.

In addition to it, we will look into the interplay between discourses of promotional materials developed for international market and the discourses of national identity building circulating in public of each particular country. By investigating the image projected by major international economic and social actors, as compared to the image suggested by national institutions, we will try to assess whether and by what communicative strategies the negotiation of identity-building values obliterates or reinforces local national values, and/or to what extent, the international version is hybridized by the national one.

Description of work

In our work package we will establish a corpus of printed and recorded materials used by national tourism boards to promote their country on the international market. The corpus will be analyzed by implementing methods of discourse analysis, cultural studies and semiotics of visual signs. Special attention will be paid to the language used in printed promotional materials in order to see to what extent the concepts and discourses of national identity circulating in public of a country permeate the language used in promotional materials. We will investigate the language of the printed promotional materials with special attention to slogans, stereotypes and other linguistic registers and visual content used in order to identify a country as an ideal tourist destination. We will also focus on the visual materials and especially signs of visual identity in order to identify their semiotic potential as linguistic signs within a complex semiotic structure of a photograph or a promotional film. We will try to analyze how different regions in Croatia and Cyprus use the same or different semiotic resources - linguistic elements included - in order to promote their national identity and at the same time their specific regional identities. We will investigate how different promoting materials, using available discursive forms, construct, reflect, maintain and transform particular systems of values and ideas regarding national identity, as well as the distribution, position and functions national identity obtains in the whole semiotic structure of the analyzed corpus.

We will also collect texts on tourist resources of the countries in question printed in guidebooks abroad so as to compare them with the official promotional materials developed by the countries themselves. Apart from this, we will conduct semi-structured interviews with officials and politicians focusing on the issues of politics of national identity and tourism. Marketing experts employed by national tourist boards to develop respective promotional materials will be interviewed as well. Planned work: (months 19-24): Desk research on the semiotics of representation, linguistic landscapes, tourism marketing and discourse analysis of linguistic signs within complex visual representations; (months 25-30): Collecting of pre-existent legal texts on tourism and printed and recorded promotional materials in countries in question, and of texts on tourism printed abroad; conducting interviews with officials and politicians in charge of promoting tourism, and with marketing experts involved in developing promotional materials; (months 31-36): Analysis of collected printed and recorded data using methods of discourse analysis, cultural studies and semiotics of representation.

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This Work Package Description as pdf

Contacts WP 2a