National Attributes Viewed through Tourism Discourse: The Case of Slovenia

This article identifies some Slovenian national attributes through statistical, semantic, and discourse analysis of the TURK tourism text corpus and the TURS tourism terminology dictionary, as well as through interviews and focus groups with Slovenian residents. Some keywords and terms in Slovenian tourism were identified using automatic keyword extraction, and analysis of the types of tourism and its various domains present in TURK and TURS reveals areas relevant for Slovenian tourism. In this way, some terms and their domains, both connected with nature, were identified. They were verified by the findings from the interviews and focus groups. Moreover, these findings also highlighted a psychological trait of the Slovenian community; that is, diligence, which is an important national attribute that seems insufficiently used in tourism. Nevertheless, a semantic and discourse analysis of this concept in the tourism and reference corpora and in dictionaries also shows its important role in Slovenian tourism discourse. The concepts of both nature and diligence can be treated as keywords in Slovenian tourism and in Slovenian culture in general. Thus, both are recognized as national attributes that could also be utilized for tourism purposes.