2010-2012 Task Force

Task Force on Tourism and Language

Co-Chair: Crispin Thurlow, University of Washington, USA
Co-Chair: Adam Jaworski, Cardiff University, Wales

Background

Contemporary tourism involves travel, however temporary and fleeting, … on a massive scale to the margins of empire and to the peripheries of modernity; it is one of the greatest population movements of all time. (Bruner, 2005: 10)


Mobilities of people and objects, airplanes and suitcases, plants and animals, images and brands, data systems and satellites, all go into “doing” tourism. Tourism is also concerned with the relational mobilizations of memories and  performances, gendered and racialized bodies, emotions and atmospheres.  (Sheller and Urry 2004, 1)

Arguably the largest international trade in the world, the great population movement of tourism affects almost everyone these days, be it those people privileged enough to “tour” or those who are “toured”. Tourism is certainly a major – truly global – cultural industry shaping a wide range of social, political and economic processes. This is one good reason why the academic study of tourism has already become so important to fields like sociology, anthropology, geography and cultural studies. What sociologists like Mimi Sheller & John Urry fail to note, however, is that language and languages too are on the move in tourism. A small but growing number of sociolinguists and discourse analysts have started to situate the analysis of language squarely within the field of tourism studies, and to consider what tourism reveals about language and social interaction in contemporary life. Typically, these scholars of language and tourism are interested in the role of language/s in representing and constituting identities, relationships and communities in the context of tourism. There is often also a concern for the ideologies of difference and relations of inequality reproduced in tourism discourse, and the role of language as a commodity in “new” service and information-based economies. 


For scholars of language and communication, tourism is a particularly rewarding domain for research: not only is tourism a major global cultural industry, but it is also a key site for intergroup encounter, for language contact, for the construction and negotiation of social identities, and for the reproduction (or perhaps reformation) of cultural attitudes, stereotypes and prejudices. Indeed, host–tourist interactions embody the very essence of intercultural and globalizing processes. It is in communication with each other, in every particular instance of contact, that hosts and tourists negotiate the nature of the tourist experience, the meaning of culture and place, their own identities and their relationship with each other. Any such interpersonal, face-to-face encounter is also heavily pre-figured at any number of discursive moments in the tourist enterprise; for example, in reading holiday brochures, travel guides and newspaper travelogues, watching TV holiday shows, flicking through inflight magazines or friends’ Flickr albums, etc. 


As a major service-based industry, tourism also helps drive postindustrial economies in which goods are discursively mediated and increasingly semioticized. Not only does tourism involve face-to-face (or more mediated) forms of visitor-host interaction, but the “products” purchased by tourists during their travels are symbols, ideals, memories, stories – the fantasy and performance of “going native”, having “safe adventures”, meeting new peoples and experiencing “exotic” cultures. This is where language and communication become both commodities and the vehicle for their exchange; it is also where the traditional places of language are dislocated. Snippets of language formulae, not unlike material goods such as souvenirs, are brought back from foreign trips as useful props in the enactment of tourist narratives. 

 The IALSP Task Force

In constituting this Task Force, our goal is to bring to highlight the scholarly significance of tourism in general, and its relevance to social psychology in particular. Such a vast and complex social domain – with an equally extensive and varied interdisciplinary coverage – makes it difficult to address everything. As we’ve noted before (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2010; cf also Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), there are as many tourisms as there are tourists, and it is only ever for analytic or commercial convenience that they come to be organized into “types” or “modes” of travel. As such, the Task Force cannot possibly hope to account for all tourisms or all tourists. Nor can it cover the numerous ways in which language/s figure in contemporary tourism or the many different ways scholars choose to feature tourism in their work. Nonetheless, our goal is to offer a variety of perspectives focused on the role of language in tourism – what we ourselves dub “the sociolinguistics of fleeting relationships” (Jaworski & Thurlow, forth.).

Objectives

The International Association for Language and Social Psychology (IALSP) regularly arranges for a select group of scholars to put together a “state of the field” report to share with the broader academic community oriented to the social psychology of language, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, etc. The main outcomes of these task forces are presented in a panel at the International Conference on Language and Social Psychology.  The task force chairs usually also present a summary at the International Communication Association conference. The results of the current Task Force on Language and Tourism will be presented first at the IALSP 13 conference in mid-June 2012 at the Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden, Netherlands – hosted by the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning.

Click here to see the scholars and abstracts for the task force on Language and Tourism

References

Bruner, E. M. (2005). Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2010). Language and the globalizing habitus of tourism: A sociolinguistics of fleeting relationships. In N. Coupland (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalisation (pp. 256-286). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jaworski, A. and Thurlow, C. (forth.). Making Contact: Language, Tourism and Globalization. London & New York: Routledge.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (eds). (2004). Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. London: Routledge.
Thurlow, C. & Jaworski, A. (2010). Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave MacMillan.