Sociolinguistic studies in the field of tourism have recently been a popular area of investigation. Gudrun Held's edited volume contributes to the growing collection of papers concerning the discourses of tourism, in particular into the relationship between language and John Urry's conception of the ‘tourist gaze’, as she notes in her introduction. The various papers commonly adopt Jef Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory framework, lending the work an ‘essentially pragmatic perspective’, and build on Graham Dann's work on the sociolinguistics of tourism. The means of analysis are largely Critical Discourse Analysis and, where relevant, multimodal analysis is employed as well. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used; for example, Christina Samson's study (ch. 15) on the language of museum websites and Vesna Mikolič’s (ch. 4) study of Slovenian tourism discourse utilise a textual corpus approach, while Uta Helfrich's chapter (ch. 5) on visual branding in a Spanish tourism campaign utilises a multimodal discourse analysis approach.
The papers cover a wide range of data and methodology, and are divided into four parts—‘Textual practices’, ‘Tourist interactions’, ‘Genres’, and ‘Media’—with a total of fifteen papers including Held's introduction. Papers in the ‘Media’ section commendably focus on data drawn from ‘new’ forms of communication. Olga Denti's paper (ch. 13) considers authenticity and identity as observed through the Cagliari mobile application. Maria Rosario Compagnone & Giuliana Fiorentino's paper (ch. 14) investigates tourists’ perspectives through postings from review website TripAdvisor, and Sabine Wahl's (ch. 12) paper studies how tourist destinations are marketed through ‘teleshopping’ television programmes.
An especially insightful paper is Adam Wilson's (ch. 7) analysis of audio recordings of tourist interactions in a tourist information centre in Marseille, France, where ‘thousands of tourists each day… enquire for and receive information through verbal face-to-face interactions with the tourist advisers’ who staff the centre. The short interactions nicely bring together the concept of adaptability and tourism discourse. He organises his analysis into key themes in the interactions, such as authenticity, strangerhood, and play and offers insight into the linguistic means in which tourists and advisers negotiate their exchange, especially since they often do not speak the same first language.
Another notable paper is Marcella Costa & Miriam Ravetto's (ch. 8) paper on interactional strategies used by tour guides during guided tours to cope with ‘latent asymmetries inherent in the social and interactional structure’ (145) of such communication. Through audio and video recordings of guided tours in Germany where German-speaking guides presented to international students from different countries, various kinds of asymmetry are analysed, including interactional, knowledge, and linguistic asymmetry, which highlight how strategies of adaptation are required to fill in gaps resulting from the interactional context.
Held's volume brings breadth and depth to the field of tourism discourse. Regrettably, the data studied in the volume is largely Eurocentric, and the global nature of tourism discourse, as Held herself notes, means that the book would have benefited from data drawn from further afield. Nonetheless, the volume should prove useful to researchers interested in the intersection of language, globalisation, flows, and tourism as observable from interactions both on and offline.
