English in tourism: a sociolinguistic perspective

Abstract

Tourism has become one of the central phenomena of a post-modern society greatly owing to its liaison with language. Especially prominent is the link between tourism and English language which, being the global lingua franca, not only monopolises all negotiations/transactions that take place in a tourist destination, but also functions as a creator of a destination’s many realities, indeed as the very embodiment of processes in tourism. Over the past decade the multifunctionality of English in tourism has attracted considerable sociolinguistic research. This paper discusses the importance of merging sociolinguistics with the theory of tourism. The clear advantage of tourism scholars’ acceptance of sociolinguistics as an accredited field of study lies not only in developing new understandings of language/discourse in tourism but also in an increased transdisciplinarity of two perceivedly distant fields of study: sociolinguistics and tourism.