Official Tourist Websites and the Cultural Communication Grammar model: analysing language, visuals, and cultural features

This paper aims to analyse the homepages of four official tourist websites, namely the websites which promote Italy, France, Germany, and New Zealand according to a new framework, labelled here as ‘Cultural Communication Grammar’. This methodological approach combines the approach of Multimodal analysis (Halliday 1978, 1984; Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) with the framework provided by Intercultural studies (Hofstede 1991, 2001; Hall 1982, 1983; Brake et al. 1995; Katan 2006) and aims at classifying the cultural features represented on official tourist websites through the analysis of language and visuals. Findings reveal that cultures systematically select definite linguistic and visual communication modes in the way they describe their cultural values, exchange information between participants and structure the messages which carry the content of the communicative event.