'No one can be the invisible tourist - but we like that you are trying': An Analysis of the Language of Sustainable Tourism

The increase in public concern over sustainability issues has led businesses to behave ethically, and to communicate and demonstrate their integrity. Tourism is no exception to this trend. As such, new forms of tourism, prefixed with sustainable and eco-, for example, have proliferated. Set against this background, the paper explores the discourse of sustainable tourism and investigates some common strategies deployed to promote responsible places. With the support of corpus linguistics tools, the websites of the most sustainable destinations in Europe were analysed in a selection of recurrent content and function words. The study of frequent items in their phraseology reveals that the promotion of responsible tourism derives from the collective functioning of patterns typical of ‘traditional’ tourism promotion (e.g. emphatic language, emotional formulae referring to authenticity, and attractiveness), and sustainability-related tools (e.g. expressions describing commitment and dedication to the environment, local communities and visitors).