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ABSTRACT
This corpus-based study examines whether and how German-, French- and Spanish-speaking tourists refer to language experiences when they write an online hotel review (specifically of hotels situated in Dutch-speaking Flanders, Belgium). We find that language is indeed an issue in hotel reviews, but to varying degrees according to the language group of the tourists. French and especially Spanish-speaking tourists refer far more frequently to language experiences, and in particular to the use of their mother tongue, than German-speaking tourists. According to the ‘face model of language choice’, this means that French- and Spanish-speaking tourists emphasize more explicitly their ‘ethnolinguistic face’ than German-speaking tourists. Also, the positive–negative polarity of the judgments differs, with Spanish-speaking tourists at the most positive pole, and French-speaking tourists at the most negative pole. Furthermore, the data also reveal that the use of the mother tongue of the tourist and the use of an international link language (by default, English) are functionally different options, and that the use of English even may lead to face-threatening situations. By comparing the data with staff-related judgments and hotel ratings, it is shown that language plays a specific and independent role in the hotel reviews.
Este estudio examina si y cómo turistas germanófonos, francófonos e hispanohablantes se refieren a sus experiencias lingüísticas en reseñas de hoteles 2.0 (en particular de hoteles en Flandes, la parte neerlandófona de Bélgica). Veremos que la lengua es efectivamente un tema recurrente en las reseñas, aunque su frecuencia varía según el grupo lingüístico de los turistas. Los turistas francófonos e hispanohablantes se refieren con más frecuencia a sus experiencias lingüísticas y, en particular, al uso de su lengua materna, que los turistas germanófonos. Siguiendo el ‘face model of language choice’, esto significa que los turistas francófonos e hispanohablantes enfatizan más su ‘imagen etnolingüística’ que los germanófonos. También varía la proporción entre comentarios positivos y negativos: los hispanohablantes son los más positivos y los francófonos los más críticos. Finalmente, los resultados también muestran que usar la lengua materna del turista o una lengua franca (por defecto, el inglés) son opciones funcionalmente diferentes. El inglés incluso puede crear situaciones amenazantes para la imagen de los interlocutores. Comparando los datos con los juicios sobre el personal y la calificación de los hoteles, mostramos que las experiencias lingüísticas desempeñan un papel específico e independiente en las reseñas de hoteles.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Patrick Goethals is an Associate Professor in Spanish multilingual communication at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication, Ghent University (Belgium). His main research interests are Spanish linguistics, corpus-based translation studies, multilingual communication and tourism communication. He has published several articles in international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Meta, Linguistics, Ibérica and Multilingua.
Notes
1. Taking into account that one page of booking.com includes 25 hotel evaluations, in French or Spanish reviews there is, on average, more than one LR-comment per page.
2. Examples are quoted verbatim. Possible linguistic errors are not signaled. Source information includes the nationality of the tourist, the starred rating of the hotel, and the city.
3. The data on the German-written comments do not confirm the frequency results. More data would be necessary to verify this finding, since the low number of German LR-judgments restricts the scope of the qualitative analysis.