Sustainable Tourism Register

The fact that a variety of topics exists within the language of tourism indicates the presence of a plurality of registers. One of them is sustainable tourism - expressed through a sustainable tourism register (STR)1, which represents a sociolinguistic medium through which this type of tourism is discussed and promoted. The paper analyses comparatively the most prominent features of the terminological area and word formation level of the STR which, nowadays, is exposed to the strong influence of English terminology. It focuses on similarities and differences in adaptation to the related German, Italian and French linguistic systems. The corpus consists of terms taken from English as a donor language, i.e. of about 60 original English terms culled from case studies on sustainable tourism published on the Internet, which were selected according to the type of analysis performed. Analysis of word formation level revolves around suffixes and prefixes, as well as compound formation, with special emphasis on similar and different features within the different languages analyzed. Findings from this study demonstrate both terminological diversity as well as similarity of sustainable tourism terms found in a contrastable analysis of German, English, French and Italian