Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility

In this engaging and lively book, Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski present a compelling analysis of – and new insight into – the role of spoken, written and visual discourse in producing tourism as a global cultural industry. Framed by the symbolic and economic orders of global mobility, Tourism Discourse presents an empirically based discussion of language ideologies and host – visitor relations in contemporary tourism.

Each chapter investigates a different tourism genre: inflight magazines, trade signs and business cards, tourists' postcard messages, television holiday shows, newspaper travelogues and guidebook glossaries. For Thurlow and Jaworski, these ‘discourses on the move’ illuminate the everyday experience and ‘banal enactment’ of globalization.

Tourism Discourse offers new insights into the role of spoken, written and visual discourse in representating and producing tourism as a global cultural industry. With a view to the interplay between the symbolic and economic orders of global mobility, the book is grounded in empirically-based studies of key tourism genres.

CRISPIN THURLOW is an associate professor of Communication and Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, Seattle. His books include Talking Adolescence: Perspectives on Communication in the Teenage Years (2005) and, with Adam Jaworski, Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space (2009) and Language Tourism, Globalization: The Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships (2010). He is Associate Editor for the National Communication Association's Journal of International and Intercultural Communication.

ADAM JAWORSKI is a professor at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, UK. His books include Discourse, Communication and Tourism (2005, with Annette Pritchard), The Discourse Reader (2006) and The New Sociolinguistics Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) (both with Nik Coupland).