Throughout the course of this book I have been concerned to address the relationship between tourism and languages as it is made manifest in people doing tourism by learning tourist languages. I have asked the question: why bother? Why bother in a tourist world that speaks English and in a world where money talks? Why bother if you can speak English, whether as a native or a non-native speaker? Many don’t. Some do. The question of why people do good is a perennial one in moral theory. The question of why people might not bother is easy to answer. So I have puzzled over the bothering. I have come at the issue from several directions, responding to the possibilities that the energy, time and will expended might suggest. I have found avoidance of risk, a desire for education, a broadening of the mind through travel and languages. I have identified the gains of linguistic capital and its currency in other languages.

I have shown the practice of tourist language learning and of languaging to be a complex process and have explored this, in a quest for some answers to the bothering question. I have done this by examining lessons in asking for directions and the practices of way finding, through discussions of the tourist imaginings, through the move into a language, through lessons in pronunciation. I found parabolic tales in the narrations that accompanied the language learning experiences. These led me to argue that the activity of speaking from the body as a tourist language learner and languager was an aspect of human movement, changing the nature of perceptions from the place of dwelling; that it was rather like magic. As such I found transforming potential in the activity.