An Introduction to English Tourism Discourse

Abstract

Tourism has an extraordinary impact on society as a marketing product as attested by the huge number of studies devoted to tourism. Its interdisciplinary nature makes the domains of tourism a scholarly focus in various fields – architecture, archaeology, business and marketing, economics, environment, geography, history of the arts, psychology, religion and sociology, as well as gastronomic, entertainment and sports events, and recently even sustainability. Surprisingly, despite the fact the tourism industry is worth almost € 1.2 trillion, and despite the fact that most activities within this industry are undertaken in English as a lingua franca, the role of English in the tourism field remains rather unexplored. From an applied linguistics perspective, tourism on the one hand employs promotional discourse, and as such it targets laymen; on the other, it utilizes specialized discourse, and as such it is used by professionals. As a specialised discourse used by professionals, the multidimensional features of the language of tourism emerge in communicative events among specialists, which reveal standardized procedures and processes, as well as shared knowledge. Linguistically speaking, tourism can therefore be seen as a macro-specialized discourse which groups together as many specialized languages as the different disciplinary domains and sub-domains it deals with. As a non-specialised discourse, the very same multidimensional nature of the language of tourism can be detected in the interactions between specialists and non-specialists. The chapter aims at describing those lexical, syntactical and textual features of tourism discourse in general that characterize both specialised and non-specialised language.