Language Commodification in Digital Tourism Landscape: A Corpus-Based Approach to Destination Branding Strategies

The digital landscape has become the primary medium for tourism promotion, where language plays a vital role in constructing destination image. While digital marketing continues to attract growing interest, there’s still a noticeable gap in research when it comes to understanding how language itself is turned into a commodity in digital tourism. Addressing this gap, the study aims to reveal how language is commodified in digital tourism promotion and to analyze the branding strategies reflected in its linguistic features. A total of 18 official tourism destination websites in Indonesia over the period of 2023 to 2024, the data were analyzed using AntConc software, generating a corpus of 39,135 tokens. The analysis focused on word frequency, collocation, concordance, and semantic prosody to identify dominant linguistic patterns. The findings reveal that digital tourism promotion is dominated by affective and visually charged vocabulary such as “indah”, “pengalaman”, “unik”, “spot” and “instagrammable”, which collectively contribute to constructing an aesthetic and emotional narrative of the destinations. The identified branding strategies include emotional appeal, visual-social imagery, exclusivity, cultural authenticity, and comfort and accessibility. The implications of this study underscore the importance of linguistic data in designing more effective tourism promotion strategies grounded in emotional resonance and social relevance. This research contributes to the development of applied linguistics within the context of the digital tourism industry and provides strategic insight for destination managers in crafting more compelling and competitive branding narratives.