Volume 12, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Tourist spaces in the nexus of language and materiality; Guest Editors: Gavin Lamb and Bal Krishna Sharma

This special issue builds on sociolinguistic research in tourism, semiotic landscapes, language materiality, and multilingual and multimodal practices to explore how spaces for tourism are formed at the nexus of language and the material world.

This article builds upon research which analyses the reconstruction of cities in China as an integral part of image-making discourses competing to attract mobile capital. It extends that literature beyond urban places to urbanisation processes, examining the material and linguistic features of networks and discourses of new high-speed rail infrastructure Guangxi, a poorer, rural, multilingual and multiethnic region of the People’s Republic of China (China) in which tourism – propelled by high-speed trains – has become a pillar of economic development. It argues that these trains produce symbolically powerful discourses which contribute to cultural urbanisation across Guangxi, emplacing urban norms outside city limits in pursuit of profitable sameness, as tourism does not trade only upon difference. Local multilingualism, specifically, is erased as too different, a barrier to tourists’ (and tourism capital’s) mobility. Amongst other ramifications, this reproduces social distance and ideologically displaces local languages.

This article examines the recent growth of culinary tourism in the Basque Country (Hegoalde or Southern Basque Country), and how its effects have shaped the use of Euskara (the Basque language) and multilingual practices through concepts of materiality. Derived from my research, which looks at how Euskara is used to promote gastronomic products, this analysis relies upon the two concepts of geosemiotics and language materiality to reveal how materiality influences value and language use in touristic settings. We can analyze language as it is materially placed in the world by studying the physical substances on which an inscription is made. This materiality also exists as part of a stratigraphy of non-neutral forms that include a wide range of presentations that influence how we interact with text, while also providing a lens through which consumption and material culture studies emerge. Derived from interviews, the examination of beverage labels, and observations of the linguistic landscape, the findings of this research illustrate how Euskara is used – despite some producers’ reluctance – alongside more dominant languages as culinary tourism increases. In doing so, it highlights emergent opposing reactions to tourism that express concern for the changing social, economic, linguistic, and political environment. Through the examples illustrated, the materiality of Euskara can increase the value of both the language and marketed products. However, the added or even decreased value of a language is contingent on the physical and social landscape in which gastronomy is promoted. By developing ideas of how and where language materiality, commodification, and value are produced, advocates of minoritized languages such as Euskara can better strategize the promotion of their gastronomic and tourist sectors without losing the cultural and linguistic identity that contributes to these sectors’ value.

This article closely examines how both linguistic and non-linguistic objects and inscriptions emplaced in the built environment transform the traditional residential-business street into a space of consumption for a new generation of Chinese tourists. The data consists of observation notes, photographs, and interviews obtained from an ethnographic fieldwork in Kathmandu, Nepal. The article makes three major arguments. First, the semiotic shift and the social practices that inhabit the space represent a key feature of a late capitalist society with a focus on the commodification of languages, cultures, and identities. Second, the practices index the global power of the Chinese language in challenging English and marginalizing other tourist languages. And third, these shifts urge us to understand the relation between semiotic and material resources in redefining traditionally West-oriented global tourism economies. The study overall provides new insights into how language and material goods can create a completely different kind of Chinatown, entailing a new interaction order between business owners and tourists, which use intertextuality, translanguaging, and multimodality, among others, as resources. These findings are starkly different from studies that have examined traditional Chinatowns in diasporic contexts.

This paper examines the discursive practices of sea turtle ecotourism that transform a beach in Hawai‘i into a popular sea turtle tourism destination. I analyze the circulation of an ecotourism discourse of spectacular nature that cycles through several distinct circuits of discursive remediation to produce Laniākea Beach as a sea turtle tourism destination. This ecotourism discourse entangles sea turtles and people into a discursive-material infrastructure of spectacular nature which the sea turtle tourism industry in Hawai‘i enlists to commodify human encounters with this charismatic species. Bringing complementary approaches in ecotourism studies and mediated discourse analysis that take human-nonhuman embodied (inter)actions as a starting point for discourse analysis, I trace how this ecotourism discourse itinerates across three distinct circuits of sea turtle tourism: (1) commercial tourism representations (on websites, guidebooks and street advertising), (2) in tourists’ embodied encounters with sea turtles (touching, pointing at, swimming with and talking about actual sea turtles), and (3) through online remediation of these embodied encounters (on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook). The study suggests implications for how embodied and material approaches to discourse analysis in applied linguistics can bring empirical focus to the (un)ethical dimensions of wildlife ecotourism practices.

This article traces how new linguistic practices emerge alongside the development of tourism in Hawai‘i and Japan. We trace and describe two networks of tourism to illustrate how signs, speech, and embodied communication materialize in actor networks. We frame these new spatial repertoires as examples of language learning and language change that occurs as an effect of human mobility intersecting with material affordances in new environments. We compare the relatively new emergence of such spatial repertoires in Izumisano, a residential neighborhood in Oʻsaka, to the more established repertoires that have formed in Kailua, a residential beach town on O‘ahu in Hawai‘i. In Izumisano, we focus on the emergence of Chinese alongside English, and in Kailua, we examine the recent emergence of the Japanese language. In both contexts, we identify how language first emerges in written form on signs in relation to other actants such as pancakes, airports, and train stations. This signage later becomes part of the embodied actions by service providers who acquire multimodal verbal repertoires through their interactions with tourists.

The articles in the present special issue, Tourism spaces at the nexus of language and materiality , are commented on through the lens of “sociolinguistic change” (Coupland 2014), and four pairs of relations: modernity and tradition ; de- and re-centering of languages ; elite and mass tourism ; profit and prejudice . Brief concluding remarks touch on the relationship between the symbolic and material aspects of language.