Tourist Orality and Literacy

The multilingual, intercultural soundscapes of tourism are created out of everyday practices and concerns. Tourists may attempt to order food in the language of the destination; they may write the name of their home country in the language of the destination on postcards, they may equally hope that someone they are with will make the attempt for them. There is a rigorous market in tourist phrase books. Textually, tourist destinations are multilingual sites, full of multilingual signage, as are the spaces through which tourists pass when in transit. The commentary and stories that accompany tourist experiences are crafted in and through languages, picking up words and accents from the destination, to describe the place and to craft it into stories.

The shifts between structure and anti-structure, in the encounters with the sounds of a language, as they are detached from the messiness and incomprehensible noise of being a language that is not known, are both subtle and micro scale. The attaching and gathering process at work in the pronunciation of sounds is peculiar to the language – in the case here, of Portuguese, or Italian. This occurs in the ‘quick’ of human relatedness, in the thick of things, through mimesis and repetition. These particular moments of experiential intersection reveal something of how the thickness, indeed the opacity of a language, may be thinned down, through this gathering and attaching process that does not require some separate mode of thought but is in itself the process of thinking (Ingold, 2000; Mcfague, 1975).