TOURISTS AND TOURISM IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

The present issue of Textus focuses on tourism discourse from the many broad perspectives of linguistic analysis. Tourism is cultural per se. The search for new territories and new spaces, the desire to go and experience them sur place, presupposes a willingness to encounter and to discover new worlds, new cultures, new languages and new discourses. The experience of linguistic difference, whether merely dialectal or an utterly foreign tongue, is a salient dimension of traveling abroad, one of its primary challenges and attractions. And learning new words and expressions is just as much a part of the tourist experience as the exposure to new places, peoples and cultures. At the same time, this ancient tendency to experience the other of place, of society, of culture and language is both supported and exploited under modern conditions of mass tourism, whose promoters direct the traveller toward specific touristic destinations by highlighting particular aspects and patterns of their cultural identity through guidebooks, brochures, advertising and more recently, through the internet and social media. There is thus clearly a specific literature, and perhaps a specialized discourse, that subtends and organizes the modern experience of tourism but whose semantic parameters and occurrences remain to be charted. Until recently, most scholarly critical work on tourism published in the western world has come from the field of sociology. Tourism as a social, cultural and economic activity has been amply described and analysed by sociologists from both sides of the Atlantic (cf. Rojek, 1997, Chambers, 2000, Cohen, 2004; Urry, 2002, Boyer-Viallon, 2000, Cogno-Dall’Ara, 1997). Some occasional linguistic works on tourist discourse appeared in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s (MacCannell, D., 1976; Van Den Abbeele G., 1980, 1992; Culler, J., 1988). MacCannell’s work, in particular, signals the expansion of concerns from the sociological to the linguistic.