Introduction: Sociolinguistics and tourism – mobilities, markets, multilingualism

Abstract

In the introduction to this special issue on Sociolinguistics and Tourism, we focus on language in tourism as an important window into contemporary forms of economic, political, and social change. Our aim is twofold: (1) to establish and extend ‘sociolinguistics and tourism’ as another social and applied domain of sociolinguistic research; and (2) to use tourism as a lens for a broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of late modernity. To this end, we outline the contours of language and tourism research to date; we consider the (re)conceptualization of key thematics or notions in sociolinguistic research – such as ‘community’, ‘identity’, and ‘language’ itself – as particularly germane to the study of tourism's fleeting encounters; we examine the inevitable tensions between commodification and authenticity; and we explore the links between performances of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and the contestation of different identity positions with regard to social actors’ multilingual repertoires. We illustrate these issues with data examples from several tourist sites, where multilingual resources are deployed for identification, authentication and commodification. Finally, we briefly introduce the papers in this special issue and conclude by commenting on some sociolinguistic consequences of the study of language/s in tourism.

English in French Commercial Advertising: Simultaneity, bivalency, and language boundaries

“…Many multilingual adverts in France use design features such as text size, positioning, colour, and asterisks to distinguish holistically between languages. As demonstrated around the world, such signs often target non‐French‐reading audiences, particularly in the tourism context (Bruyèl‐Olmedo & Juan‐Garau, , ; Heller, Jaworski, and Thurlow, 2014; Heller, Pujolar, and Duchêne, 2014). Many of these signs make a clear distinction between French and non‐French sections, embodying the interpretation of languages as discrete and separable, a misconception perpetuated by the discourse of language management in France.…”

Introduction: Language and globalization in South and Central Asian spaces

“…These changes have sparked a range of sociolinguistic research, while also unsettling categories which have long been central to sociolinguistic metalanguage and metatheory, notably "language" and "speech community" (cf., e.g., Blommaert 2005;Makoni and Pennycook 2007;Rampton 2009;Heller et al 2014). Indeed, as Blommaert (2010: 1) maintains, "globalization forces sociolinguistics to unthink its classic distinctions and biases and to rethink itself as a sociolinguistics of mobile resources, framed in terms of trans-contextual networks, flows and movements".…”

A comparative corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of hosts in promotional tourism discourse

“…Thus, it has a far-reaching impact on a vast number of people, yet the nature of this impact is rather one directional; despite the growth of tourism in the developing world, it is mostly the 'first world' people who can afford to travel to faraway destinations and there encounter local people who mostly cannot share this kind of experience. The inequality inherent to this 'contact' together with its cultural and linguistic differences makes tourism a prime site for the investigation of social categorisations and patterns of inclusion and exclusion (Heller et al, 2014). Secondly, the tourist experience is nowadays strongly driven by the desire for 'authentic' encounters, especially with local people and their alternative or 'primitive' ways of life (White, 2007).…”