Tourism discourse: Languages and banal globalization

Abstract

Described as the “one of the greatest population movements of all time,” tourism is firmly established as one of the world’s largest international trades. And it is not just people who are on tour; language too is on the move. In this paper we examine some of the ways that our research has shown language commonly being taken up in tourism’s search for exoticity and authenticity. Specifically, we present a series of different touristic genres (broadcast media, guidebook glossaries, guided tours) where local languages are stylized, recontextualized and commodified in the service of tourist identities and of tourism’s cosmopolitan mythology. It is in this way that the globalizing habitus (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) of tourism privileges or elevates those who choose to travel, containing linguistic/cultural difference under a guise of celebration and respect. These playful, seemingly innocuous “textualizations” of language/s are also exemplary enactments of banal globalization (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010), the everyday, micro-level ways in which the social meanings and material effects of globalization are realized.