Institutional Healthcare E-Brochures and Multilingualism Issues in the Recent Immigration Era in Italy (2007-2010)

Based on a corpus of 273 healthcare institutional websites collected from the site of Italy’s Ministry of Health (http://www.ministerosalute.it), this paper tries to find evidence of the recent (2007-2010) immigrants’ presence in the channels the Italian healthcare institutions employ to communicate with the public, with a particular focus on the typology of health information directed at them.
Special attention is drawn to the description and definition of the institutional healthcare (e)brochures for foreigners (i.e. the new immigrants to Italy) from a genre analysis and a critical discourse analysis perspective. The investigation reveals a general tendency toward simplification in the texts’ structures and rhetorical strategies employed as well as a heavy shift from the writing to the visual semiotic code. Moreover, though the general informative/educational framework still proves to be valid, a reduction in contents (word density and quantity) suggests that a functional change has occurred, that is to say that (e)brochures directed at the new immigrants in the healthcare domain are used as a first contact tool for accessing public healthcare facilities, rather than provide answers or describe diseases and conditions as was the case with their paper, antecedent version.