Lessico e accessibilità digitale nei siti web museali tedeschi: configurazioni testuali in Leichte Sprache

This contribution examines the role of accessible language in digital museum communication, with particular attention to museum websites in the German-speaking context. Within this framework, Leichte Sprache represents a codified model of linguistic simplification aimed at ensuring the comprehensibility of content for a heterogeneous audience, in accordance with established guidelines in German-language research (Bredel/Maaß 2016; Crestani 2025; Maaß 2015; Netzwerk Leichte Sprache 2013). The article analyses a corpus of 20 museum websites, focusing on sections dedicated to accessible communication. Through a qualitative-quantitative approach, it investigates the main strategies of textual structuring and simplification, with particular attention to lexical choices and morphosyntactic parameters. The analysis is not based on a systematic comparison with standard versions of the texts; rather, it aims to describe the linguistic configurations of museum Leichte Sprache as an autonomous discursive practice within the digital space. From this perspective, the study focuses on specific parameters, including nominal density and nominalizations, syntactic complexity, the handling of museological terminology, and the semantic transparency of verbal structures. The findings reveal a significant presence of Leichte Sprache across the analysed websites, albeit with differences in consistency and degree of standardization. These results make it possible to interpret the integration of accessible language also in terms of communicative sustainability: the lexicon of accessibility emerges not as an ancillary repertoire, but as a structural device for the qualitative reorganization of discourse, oriented towards the Nutzbarkeit of cultural content and the redefinition of access conditions to cultural heritage.