抄録
These days, one of the main targets of the tourism industry in rural areas in Japan is to increase the number of tourists from foreign countries. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to provide foreign tourists with “language service.” In this study, in order to understand the state of language service, Komatsu Airport and Toyama Airport in the Hokuriku region are taken up as examples, English guidebooks available at those local airports are metrically analyzed metrically, compared with guidebooks at international airports in Japan and overseas. In short, frequency characteristics of character- and word-appearance are investigated using a program written in C++. These characteristics are approximated by an exponential function. Furthermore, the percentage of Japanese junior high school required vocabulary and American basic vocabulary is calculated to obtain the difficulty-level of each material. As a result, it was clearly shown that English tourist guidebooks available at local airports in Japan have a similar tendency to English literary writings in character-appearance, and the difficulty-level for them is low.
