‘Quick’ is an old English word used to refer to vibrancy and to anything characterised by the presence of life.

What happens when we ignore the ‘quick’, when our habitual ways of researching social, cultural and linguistic practices fail to search out the presence of life? The ‘quick’ of human relationship, the interstices of life, energy and freshness are repeatedly and systematically excluded from research into languages and from research into tourism. In the discourses of endangered languages, skills-shortages and language crisis we find little to suggest vibrancy. Equally in many of the dystopian accounts of tourism as a blight on the planet, or in the critical voices that consider its effects, we find little to suggest a freshness and liveliness that may come through relationship and encounter. And yet holidays – shaped into tourism, touched by languages – we know, offer refreshment, renewal and a revitalisation. Tourism has become one of the greatest repositories for our imagination of happiness.

There is much that is ‘quick’ when a tourist steps out of her habitual ways of speaking and viewing the world, and has a go at speaking the language of her hosts. And yet, in the literature on languages and the languages crises, we find virtually no mention at all of the wide practice of learning other languages, or of what I term the languaging practices of tourists – having a go, trying to make sense and getting somewhere against all the odds. Life. Energy. Freshness. In the same way in the research into tourism we find a massive multilingual phenomenon boiled down to a few articles bemoaning the lack of language skills in its servants, and a few more critically assessing the patterns of discourse and the potential symbolic violence inherent in such representations. Modern linguists ignore tourism in their research, with one or two exceptions making forays into the study of travel writing, and tourism scholars ignore the main medium of tourism – not language, but languages.