Greenspeak: An Analysis of the Language of Eco-tourism

Abstract

One of the registers of the language of tourism is ‘Greenspeak’, a promotional discourse which focuses on the environment and the corresponding motivations of the new green tourist Like the language of tourism itself, Greenspeak is also multi-layered. This paper, while acknowledging that such a language is both pictorial and verbal, concentrates on the latter component The first outer covering or surface layer sees the advertiser luring the eco-tourist through a series of captions or headlines, some of which are accompanied by brief explanatory messages. A perusal of a number of print media advertisements demonstrates an attempt to woo the client by contrasting the simplicity of the destination area with the complexities of an alienated urban existence in the consumer. Travel thus becomes a liberating escape with limitless possibilities. The second layer witnesses Greenspeak's attempt to associate itself with various principles of eco-tourism. At a covert level, however, the eco-explicitness of the message hides the agenda of the promoter, i.e. the exploitation of the periphery by the centre and the appropriation of rural patrimony by outsiders. The third layer shows how Greenspeak tries to convert the themes of conventional mass tourism ('sun', ‘sea’, ‘sand’ and ‘sex’) to those of eco-tourism ('nature', ‘nostalgia’ and ‘nirvana’), the latter being separately examined with several examples. However, closer inspection reveals that ‘nature’, instead of being presented in its pristine form, is offered as a ‘cooked’ version of ‘raw nature’ – a cultural production of the ‘natural’. Furthermore, the sexual imagery it seeks to replace is still present in a discourse of narcissism. Similarly, ‘nostalgia’ is based on a romantic socially constructed version of reality, one that is underpinned by eco-fundamentalism. Finally, ‘nirvana’, which is a Greenspeak substitute for ‘paradise’, completes the trilogy. Yet even here, blissful union with nature is largely a flattened and contrived experience.