Tourism and Hospitality Management, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp.

13-22, 2008
R. Fox: ENGLISH IN TOURISM: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

T.E.I. Thessaloniki UDC 81'276:338.48:811.111'27

Greece
Original scientific paper
Received: 04.03.2008

Institut for Economic

Promotion,
Austrian Economic
Chamber,
Vienna, Austria

Department of Tourism
Management

ENGLISH IN TOURISM:
A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

Renata Fox
University of Rijeka, Croatia1

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.

Key words: English language, tourism, sociolinguistics, modes of knowledge, transdisciplinarity.

1. INTRODUCTION

The variety of ways in which English language relates to tourism has attracted
much attention. Within a range of fields of study--for example, theory of tourism,
destination marketing/management/branding, hospitality, advertising, sociology of
tourism--English in tourism has been highlighted as a factor of the process of ‘language
brokerage’ (Cohen and Cooper 1986), as a means of promoting a global lifestyle

1
Renata Fox, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management, University of
Rijeka, Croatia.

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R. Fox: ENGLISH IN TOURISM: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

(Thurlow and Jaworski 2003), as a key element of tourist destination branding

(Morgan, Pritchard and Pride /eds./ 2002), as enabling individuals to experience their
identity through tourism (Palmer 2005), as shaping a tourist destination (Cappelli
2006), as a key factor of tourists’ perceptions (Phipps 2006), as a carrier of a
destination’s ‘sovereign subjectivity’ (Bryce 2007) and, not least, as crucial for the new
theorising of tourism (Ateljevic, Pritchard and Morgan /eds./ 2007).

What has become prominent over the past decade is a powerful sociolinguistic
turn (e.g., Dann 1996; Jaworski and Pritchard (eds.) 2005; Jaworski, Thurlow, Ylanne-
McEwen and Lawson 2007) in researching language and tourism. The new angle has
redirected the research into English language in tourism towards explicit links between
theoretical and empirical perspectives on the tourist experience, identity, performance
and authenticity within the frame of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. It is the
aim of this paper to discuss the need for and potentials of sociolinguistics as a field of
study that can be useful to both tourism scholars and tourism managers. The paper
opens with general comments on the systemic character of a destination’s public
communication. Follows an elaboration of the communicative purposes of a destination’s
communicative events. Section four briefly addresses the issue of a destination’s
communicative event as an artefact. In the next two sections social phenomena of the
promotionalisation of public discourse and isomorphic pressures are expounded.
Section seven offers a discussion of the value of sociolinguistic knowledge for a
tourism researcher. An overview of previous sociolinguistic research into language in
tourism along with a comment on what remains to be done is given in section eight.
The paper concludes by appraising the key strategic advantages of including
sociolinguistics into the research of language/discourse in tourism.

2. A SET OF COMMUNICATIVE EVENTS

A tourist destination’s public discourse, for its importance to be fully

appreciated, has to be viewed as a system: a theoretical construct which is hierarchical,
and functional (Fox 2006b). This system consists of a number of communicative events
(for example, a media advertisement, a destination brochure/video, a guidebook, a
destination’s webpage), involving an event itself, the event’s participants (employees in
tourism, visitors to a destination), and the environment of the event’s production and
reception (traditional printed/visual media, internet). Any such communicative event is
strategic (fundamental to the destination’s identity), preplanned (created within a
destination’s formal communication network), and recorded (tangible in verbal and/or
non-verbal form).

It should, however, be mentioned that a significant part of a tourist

destination’s presence in the public space is materialised through travel articles and
travelogues which are written by travel authors who are either independent or
appointed by specialised/general journals or publishers. Unlike destination-generated
tourist materials whose main task is to persuade the consumer that a particular resort is
superior to other similar resorts, and whose evaluation of a destination cannot be
anything but positive, travel articles and travelogues can contain both positive and
negative evaluations. This paper is concerned only with destination-generated tourist

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R. Fox: ENGLISH IN TOURISM: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

materials. Produced with the intention of creating the best possible public image of a
destination, and fully controlled by a destination, destination-generated tourist
materials are, in fact, a perfect evidence of a tourist destination management’s ideas
about the function, scope and power of a destination’s public discourse.

3. COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES

A tourist destination’s communicative event, as any other communicative

event, is driven by two communicative purposes, general and specific, which determine
the schematic structure of the event and constrain choice of content and style (Fox and
Fox 2004). Whereas the general communicative purpose relates to the objective of the
communicative event and, as such, is common to all communicative events of a tourist
destination, the specific communicative purpose relates to the event’s content and, as
such, varies from event to event. A class of tourist destination communicative events
sharing the same specific communicative purpose constitutes a destination genre: a
category which redefines a destination’s communicative event at a higher level of
abstraction and relates that event to other communicative events in the same class (Fox
2006b).

Let us, for example, take a destination brochure. The general communicative
purpose common to all such brochures is the institutionalization of the destination’s
ideology. The specific communicative purpose will vary from one destination brochure
to another: one brochure might emphasise natural beauties, the other might go for
historical heritage, the third will focus on gastronomy, etc. When creating a new
destination brochure, a tourist destination is invariably focused on two chief aims:
informing and promoting (e.g., Middleton 1990; Morgan and Pritchard 2000). Both of
these aims will be realised within a brochure’s specific communicative purpose which,
as previously noted, is related to content. In other words, it is through its content that a
destination brochure aspires to accommodate two angles: the angle of (prospective)
customers with their need for facts about a destination and the angle of brochure
producers (usually a destination’s tourist authority) with their intention to promote and
motivate. From both the informing and the promoting angle, certain facts will be
considered absolutely indispensable. From the informing angle these will be, for
example, the details about tourist infrastructure (opening times, approximate prices), a
map of the destination showing tourist facilities and attractions, the info about the
nearest railway station, coach terminal, airport, etc., and, finally, reference to other
information material (calendar of events, map of trails, special offers etc.). The
promotional aspect of the brochure, on the other hand, will be realised through targeted
selection, purposeful organisation and effective combination of verbal and visual
elements which will result in precise semiotic messages. In practice, of course, these
two angles, informing and promoting, are indivisible: a particular selection of
information can have a very specific promotional effect and, vice versa, each
promotional strategy is based on a specific selection and organisation of facts (Fox and
Fox 1998).

In creating a communicative event which will benefit both the consumer and
the destination, the event creator is bound to follow certain rules. In the case of a

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R. Fox: ENGLISH IN TOURISM: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

destination brochure, for example, these rules generally refer to three levels of the
event: textual, syntactical, and lexical. Text, for example, is recommended to be clear,
precise, correct, and, above all, easy to follow. Needles to say, the clarity and logic of
text very much depend on the copywriter’s command of syntax. Also, some believe
that the use of active voice is preferable to passive: whereas active implies involvement
and activity, passive voice, apparently, can suggest distancing from the tourist as a
person (Tarlow 1996). The importance of lexical items in the language of tourism has
been dealt with by a number of authors (e.g., Cohen 1985; MacCannell 1989; Dann
1996; Fox 1999, 2004a, 2006b). Key words, selected mainly for their stimulating
effect, are typically adjectives (for example, superb, great, lovely) and nouns (for
example, adventure, dream, discovery). Their function is not only refer to the attributes
of the destination but also to communicate promises which both connect to the existing
desires of tourists and arouse new ones.

So far research into destination-generated tourist materials has amply covered

a specific communicative purpose realised through material’s informing and motivating
functions (for the link between the information sources and the destination selection cf.
for example, Woodside, Crouch, Mazanec, Oppermann, Sakai 2000; Sönmez and
Sirakaya 2002; Sirakaya and Woodside 2005; for the link between promotional
function and destination choice, for example, Court and Lupton, 1997, Sirakaya,
Sönmez and Choi 2001; also Morgan and Pritchard 2000; Morgan, Pritchard and Pride
/eds./ 2002). Although promotional materials are generally taken to be vital in the
destination selection process in the sense that customers compare material and that
such comparison can significantly affect their choice of destination, some authors (e.g.,
Morgan and Pritchard 2000) claim that there is little empirical evidence to this. It
seems that the promotional materials are used more to confirm than to identify holiday
choices.

What both descriptive and prescriptive writings on destination-generated

tourist materials somehow tend to take for granted and therefore oversee, is the general
communicative purpose. Although there exists a considerable research into the identity
of a tourist destination (e.g., Morgan and Pritchard 1998; Robinson /ed./ 2000; Walton
/ed./ 2005; Burns and Novelli /eds./ 2006), the understanding of that identity tends to
be linked to the contents rather than objectives of a destination’s public discourse.
Only research that is systematically focused on the goals of a destination’s public
discourse can trace the development of a destination’s identity--a collection of ideas,
concepts, meanings, events… on which the functioning of a tourist destination is
founded--starting with commodification and spectacularisation, leading to
institutionalization and legitimization, and, only then, to the promotionalisation of that
identity. A focus on a destination’s public discourse goal rather than content enables
the researcher to get to a tourist destination’s ideology: a cognitive system within a
destination that sets priorities among the ideas, concepts, meanings, events… that
create a destination’s identity and legitimises some of those ideas, concepts, meanings,
events… as more relevant to the benefit of a destination.

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4. ARTEFACTS

A product of a specific set of living conditions of a destination, embodying a

practical sense, and assuming material form, tourist destination communicative events
function as artefacts. They are profoundly social in the sense that they both reflect and
engage social context which at the same time is created by a destination, represents a
destination and shapes its behaviour. A tourist destination’s communicative events acting
as artefacts position the destination and its actions socially thus embodying a practical
sense, which is a part of a destination’s habitus: a set of ‘mental or cognitive structures’
through which destinations deals with the rest of society (cf. Bourdieu 1989, 1990). As a
product of socialities of a tourist destination, a destination’s habitus defines both a
destination’s social practices and tourists’ perception of those practices. As an inevitable
part of the destination’s habitus, a destination’s artefacts maintain and reproduce the
circumstances that made these social practices possible. Two sets of social circumstances
clearly detectable in the process of producing promotional materials are
promotionalisation of public discourse and isomorphic pressures.

5. PROMOTIONALISATION OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE

A part of a destination’s public communication, tourist destination public

communicative events are by definition subject to the ‘generalization’ of promotion as a
communicative function, which is probably the most obvious discourse-related
manifestation of contemporary consumer culture (cf. Wernick 1991). The life in
postmodern society which views consumption as the most desirable of all modes of
behaviour and a commodity in itself, is highly destandardised: the range of acceptable
behaviours has increased, and there is no longer a ‘regular’ life pattern (Buchmann 1989).
Tourists, as all other consumers, are, in reality, ‘hedonists and dreamers’ torn between the
perfections of their dreams and the imperfections of reality, which gives rise to their
‘continual longing’ and ‘inexhaustability of wants’ (Campbell 1995: 95) and enables
them to ‘experience in reality the pleasurable dramas which they have already enjoyed in
imagination’ (p. 89-90). Believing themselves able to direct their own lives, tourists, as
indeed other consumers, are becoming increasingly unpredictable. To control tourists and
regulate their behaviour, tourist destinations continually intensify their public
communication while at the same time emphasizing its promotional function. This is best
seen in a destinations’ reliance on the discourse of advertising which not only plays on
the tourists’ needs and reasons for consumption, but also endeavours to appeal to tourists
as consumers, to the ideology of consumerism, and to social apparatuses of controlling
tourists as consumers (Fox 2006b).

6. ISOMORPHIC PRESSURES

A second important social mechanism affecting the creation of a destination’s

public discourse will be isomorphic pressures: ‘a constraining process that forces one unit
in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions’
(DiMaggio and Powell 1983: 143). The concept of institutional isomorphism has been
developed to account for the tendency of organisations to become more and more similar

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to one another, as to cope within an increasingly rationalised society. According to

DiMaggio and Powell, it is the processes of isomorphism which result from three types of
social pressure--issues of legitimacy, uncertainty, professionalisation--that account for
much of the life of organisation as well as the relationship between the organisation and
society.

There is a definite similarity between corporations and tourist destinations in the

sense that tourist destinations, when communicating to the rest of society, do not start
from scratch neglecting all that has been done before. Neither do they list relevant
theories, for example, communication and language/discourse theories, to draw from
them when formulating their public discourses. Rather, just like corporations, tourist
destinations, under the pressure of the need for legitimacy, uncertainty, and increasing
professionalisation, imitate other (similar, more famous and/or more successful)
destinations and learn from each other.

The issues of political influence and legitimacy prompt coercive isomorphism

which will be manifested in a destination’s endeavour to satisfy social expectations of its
habitus: the need for destination-generated tourist materials to be truthful, informative
and motivating.

Uncertainty of the social environment (due to fierce competition on the global

tourist market, the life of a tourist destination is invariably full of uncertainty) encourages
mimetic isomorphism. ‘Modelling’ the examples of others can helps tourist destinations
generate useful solutions at little expense. Indeed, when comparing destination brochures,
one somehow has the impression that the key words and phrases launched in the public
discourse of leading tourist destinations, for example, New York, Monte Carlo or
Seychelles, do not take long to ripple through other, more mass market destinations’
discourses. Supplying hard evidence for this is, however, not simple. In comparison to
coercive isomorphism, mimetic isomorphism is known to be more subtle, less visible,
perhaps easier to detect but almost impossible to prove. Also, neither the lender nor the
borrower may be fully aware of the goings on. While leading tourist destinations do not
exactly desire to be copied, they are aware of the inevitability of their communicational
practices being treated as exemplary and therefore emulated by others. Borrowers, on the
other hand, start by imitating a specific communicative event (e.g. a destination brochure)
of another (more competitive) tourist destination. However, borrowers’ awareness of the
general importance of originality in public communication, will prompt them to,
sometimes unexpectedly or unwittingly, create a communicative event which will turn
out characteristically theirs. Both coercive and mimetic isomorphism are constrained by
social authority which is exerted by social powers (in case of a tourist destination these
would be a destination’s social environment and stakeholders) and which assures
discourse production within the frame of genre-defining rules.

Finally, a product of professionalisation is normative isomorphism. As all other

industries, tourism is subject to continually increasing professionalisation which is
derived from two main sources: formal education and networking. Numerous schools and
universities in the area of tourism and hospitality, along with professional associations,
are responsible for creating norms which, to quote DiMaggio and Powell (1983: 152),
result in the ‘pools of almost interchangeable individuals who occupy similar positions

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across a range of organisations’ in tourism and hospitality industry and ‘possess similarity
of orientation and disposition that might override variations in tradition‘.

7. FROM IDEAS TO A THEORY

What is needed here is a conceptual frame that will in a logical and

parsimonious manner accommodate the social circumstances of a destination’s public
discourse (generalisation of promotion as a communicative function and isomorphic
pressures) and the public discourse itself. While the daily practices of a tourist
destination’s public communication imply some set of abstract ideas that give meaning to
and shape those practices, these ideas may not necessarily be a part of a destination
management’s declarative knowledge. Nevertheless, whenever a destination and its
management are involved in a discoursal practice, more specifically, whenever they
create a communicative event, they are inevitably acting on ideas. Put together, these
ideas can provide the basis for a general theory of a destination’s public communication
(Fox 2004b, also cf. Fox and Fox 2004).

A comprehensive theory that can link a destination’s use of language/discourse

to the social constraints of that use while at the same time enabling both its critique and
improvement, is offered in sociolinguistics: a field of study focused on the ways language
functions in society, on the nature of relationships between language and society (its
institutions), and on the role of individuals and groups in sociolinguistic phenomena.
Since every act of communication is socially relevant (in the sense that it is both socially
situated and socially situating), many linguists view all linguistics as, in fact,
sociolinguistics. When Halliday wrote: ‘the linguistic system is a sociolinguistic system’
(1978: 72), he wished to make clear that researching language functions refers to both
studying components of meanings in the language system (the potential) and studying
social meanings of individual speech acts (the actual).

In the early 1970s sociolinguistics became established as a discipline. Since then

it has been applied to areas such as language varieties, language and identity, language
policy, media communication, educational issues. Today, sociolinguistics is truly
interdisciplinary constituting a meeting ground for a variety of fields of study, such as,
sociology, sociopsychology, ethnography, and cultural studies. In light of the variety of
research traditions, aims and attitudes which meet in the field of sociolinguistics, three
positions have been taken in relation to the issue of what constitutes sociolinguistic
theory. First, sociolinguistic theory is considered to be a part of linguistic theory with the
chief aim of improving an understanding of the social nature of language. Second,
sociolinguistics is viewed as an accumulation of mini-theories (e.g., ‘face’ theory,
‘accommodation’ theory, ‘network’ theory). While leading sociolinguists (e.g., Coulmas
/ed./ 1997, 2005; Coupland 1998; Hudson 1998) have suggested that sociolinguistics
should aspire to an independent theory, the very diversity of social processes researched
within sociolinguistics is a strong argument against sociolinguistics as a unified theory.
Finally, sociolinguistics is treated as a social theory focusing on the social analysis of
language. The linguistic turn in social sciences has rendered social analysis of language,
and accordingly sociolinguistics, indispensable to social research. It is precisely the
sociolinguistic theory that has the potential to advance social theory and thus provide the

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best account of how ‘people position themselves and their social worlds through
language’ (Coupland 1998: 116).

8. SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH INTO THE LANGUAGE OF

TOURISM

The first systematic sociolinguistic treatment of language and tourism was

provided by Graham Dann in his seminal and by now classic The Language of
Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective (1996). Starting with the assumption that
tourism has a discourse of its own, and that tourism, indeed, constitutes discourse,
Dann offers a rich analysis of the many social functions of language in tourism: as an
instrument of customers’ active involvement (not only in the process of consumption
but also in the process of co-creating language that induces them to consume), as a
process of social control (by containing norms and values), and as a medium of
socialization (employed by all stakeholders in development of their identities). Apart
from creating a completely new understanding of language (also language techniques
and language registers) in tourism, the book offers a fresh perspective on an extensive
body of related research (within the fields of sociology, anthropology, semiotics,
philosophy, communicational studies, and destination management).

Dann’s book paved a path for further sociolinguistic explorations into

language of tourism (e.g., Thurlow and Jaworski 2003; Jaworski and Pritchard /eds./
2005; Cappelli 2006; Fox 2006b; Phipps 2006; Brice 2007; Jaworski, Thurlow,
Ylanne-McEwen and Lawson 2007) generally focusing on the language as a creator of
identities, power and social differences in the context of tourism.

The next step, it seems, should be the adoption of sociolinguistics as an

accredited theory (or a set of theories) by the scholars in tourism, destination
management/marketing/branding, hospitality, etc. Bringing sociolinguistics into
dialogue with the theory of tourism would constitute an important contribution to the
inherent transdisciplinarity of tourism as a field of study which, precisely because of
its tendency to socialize with other fields of study, has been referred to as
‘undisciplined’ (Tribe 1997). Growth of transdisciplinarity in any field of study,
tourism too, means an acceleration of the progress towards mode-2 knowledge: a new
type of knowledge which involves a variety of mechanisms of creating/communicating
knowledge, participants from numerous disciplinary backgrounds, and a great diversity
of sites in which knowledge is produced (Gibbons et al. 2005; Fox2006a, 2007).
Unlike traditional forms of knowledge, usually referred to as mode-1 knowledge,
which are disciplinary, homogenous, hierarchical and dictated by the interests of
academic communities, mode-2 knowledge production is transdisciplinary,
heterogenous, heterarchical and transient. In consequence, it is more socially
accountable and reflexive. Therefore, adoption of sociolinguistics as supportive to the
theory of tourism will constitute a decisive move towards a new paradigm of tourism
research which will lead to the generation of new types of knowledge and, in turn,
enable new insights into the increasingly complex relationship between language and
tourism.

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R. Fox: ENGLISH IN TOURISM: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

9. DISCUSSION

Whether seen as complementary to linguistic theory, as a collection of mini-

theories, as an independent social theory, or as a combination of all three, sociolinguistics
can provide a researcher with an objective insight into the language-tourism relationship.
More precisely, it offers a theoretical frame for the systemic description and critical
analysis of the use of language in tourism from a variety of perspectives.

Linking language to society in a systemic way, sociolinguistics enables

description/analysis of a destination’s public discourse both as an instrument of
positioning/selling a destination on the tourist market and as a creator of a tourist
destination. In other words, a sociolinguistic understanding of a tourist destination’s
public discourse enables researchers, and practising managers too, to recognise a tourist
destination’s public discourse as much more than just feeding information cum promotion
to the consumer.

A tourist destination language/discourse researchers’ awareness of the

indispensability of sociolinguistics to a systemic understanding of a destination’s public
discourse will gradually make sociolinguistics an integral part of metatheorising tourism:
a process aimed both at an improved understanding of the existing theories within
tourism as a field of study, and at further development of the theory of tourism itself, that
is, at creating perspectives that overarch the existing theory by involving a seemingly
distant field of study: sociolinguistics.

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