Languages, Tourism and Life

I think I must be entirely mistaken. I must be in the wrong place. I'm here to enroll in a six-week course in Tourist Italian. The place is mobbed. We are queuing up outside the classroom door. It's like being in a vortex of the over-60s. There are no men anywhere to be seen. All is chatter and excitement and umbrellas. The contrast to my day job could not be more marked.

Why Bother?

Why do people bother to learn another language for tourist purposes? On the surface of things the answer would appear to be simple. Tourism concentrates multilingual and intercultural experiences significantly. It does so at times of great symbolic significance to tourists, times that are anticipated and that are associated, socially, culturally and often personally, with happiness. In order to survive in the multilingual, intercultural worlds of tourism being able to speak the language is an obviously advantage.

But in a globalising world that speaks English and assumes English to be a lingua franca there is nothing obvious about learning other languages. I teach languages to undergraduate students on degree programmes and our programme, like programmes in modern languages across the western world – languages other than English that is – is in crisis. The number of students applying for undergraduate courses is declining, and the siren voices asking what 'use' such courses are grow more shrill by the minute. The past decade has simultaneously seen an unprecedented growth in mobility across international borders and a decline in the learning of languages other than English in the mainstream of higher education across the globe.

At the same time the learning of languages for tourist purposes has become a growth industry. New beginner, intermediate and advanced courses proliferate across the spectrum of adult education and so-called lifelong learning.

Thick with Languages

Tourist destinations and sites are marked places, thickened through the actions of tourists and the work of hospitality. To the grounded, placed, rooted nature of beaches or museums or cathedrals or exhibitions, tourism brings people, with their personal belongings, their modes of attire and with their languages. Destinations undergo material change in cultural, social and physical ways in order to accommodate visitors and their needs. Tourists, put simply, are temporarily leisured people (Bauman, 1996) out of place (Robinson & Andersen, 2002). Although tourists are recognisable as such visually – their attire and belongings point to their mobility and leisure – they are also audibly different, speaking in languages and accents that are also out of place, often clumsy or inappropriate or loud.

Mary Douglas argued that 'dirt is matter out of place' (Douglas, 1966). As matter 'out of place' languages and tourists are invariably perceived to be problems, to be dirt, out of place, requiring solutions that will tidy up the linguistic confusion and cultural disorder that threaten the order of things, the way things are habitually carried on. As such languages have come to be considered as basic skills required by the tourist industry for its smooth, efficient running and by tourists for 'getting by' successfully. Part of the way in which the perceived disorder of multilingual tourism is dealt with by the travel industry is to train and pay people to act as a translation interface with those who arrive at a place where their native language is not spoken. Addressing the 'skills-shortage in languages' is a tourism management refrain. To be a good host, these days, is to be able to speak words of welcome – be it on websites, in tourist brochures, and as tour guides – in languages that are comprehensible, and even native to the tourists. To be a good host – in Cronin's terms (Cronin, 2003) – is to also be a translator.

But there is another side to this equation. However thick an intercultural and multilingual experience tourism may be, the opportunities for speaking the languages of the hosts are often so limited and so systematically and even technologically frustrated as to force the question again: why bother? Why bother to learn another language as a tourist? Why bother, when brochures, guidebooks and service staff speak the common languages of the tourists. Because people do. Large numbers of people – many more than those studying for language degrees in universities – attend classes in adult and continuing education in order to learn languages that they might be able to use when on holiday. This is the key paradox which is the catalyst for the explorations in this book.

The air is full of strange sounds. Snatches of conversation reach my ears. Some enter. ... German ... Austrian ... French ... American ... Australian ... Italian ... Spanish ... English ... Scots ... Lancastrian ... Portuguese ... Swabian ... Dutch ... Japanese ... and are locatable, sometimes they are comprehensible, taking me off into other worlds away from this one, through the trigger of sound on memory. I turn to my friends and speak to them in French. My partner speaks to me in English. I listen to the guide, and the commentary is German. Another guide moves forward and the place is animated with Portuguese. The tourists around me are speaking, listening, reading, some are writing. This is an intensely multilingual place.

Tourism is an intensely multilingual, intercultural experience in which the opportunities for speaking the language of the destination are often very limited. Even in an age when English is used as one of the most common languages of tourist communication, opportunities for speaking English in London, or Edinburgh or New York or Cape Town, are often limited to the moments of meeting members of the service industry – ordering coffees, buying stamps or tickets, booking in to a hotel or camp site. And, again as Cronin argues, such destinations are multilingual places, where the inhabitants may well not speak English themselves, as migrant workers in the service industry (Cronin, 2003). Linguistic and also economic power is involved in the languages used by hosts and guests alike within the tourism industry. The dominant situation is comparable to the one characterised by Nuñez:

Perhaps the most striking example of the asymmetry in host-guest relationships is to be found in linguistic acculturation in which the usually less literate host population produces numbers of bilingual individuals, while the tourist population generally refrains from learning the host's language. The cadre of bilingual individuals in a tourist-orientated community or country are usually rewarded. The acquisition of a second language for purposes of catering to tourists often results in economic mobility for people in service positions. Interpreters, tour guides, bilingual waiters, clerks, and police often are more highly compensated than the monolinguals of their communities. (Nuñez, 1977: 208)

The question that detains me in this chapter is not so much the one pertaining to the injustices inherent in the asymmetries of language power that Nuñez describes, or at least not direclty. Rather I am interested in what happens when the normal language dynamic is reversed and tourists are the ones who speak the language of the destination. What happens when tourists take the time to learn to speak with their hosts? Why do some people bother to learn the languages of the places they go to on holiday? What happens when an intercultural moral imperative works itself out in the 'quick' of tourists learning languages and languaging?

In this sense I am following the logic of the argument advanced by Crouch who criticises tourism studies for seeing space and place as inert and merely available for the inscriptions that tourism brings along (Crouch, 2002: 208). The multilingual soundscapes of tourism render touristic spaces anything but inert. Place and languages speak back and meet with tourists as part of their embodied experience of doing tourism.

Tourists are not tourists all the time, any more than hosts are only ever hosts, but in the asymmetries of languages and power the encounters within tourism are symbolically significant. Memories of tourist sound-scapes and imaginations of future encounters pervade everyday life. The music, we might say, lingers on. The motivations for the tourism industry – for the hosting destination – are relatively clear. A smoother linguistic process, a warmer, easier, accommodating welcome – so the logic goes – will help develop the destination, help increase the profits. Smooth processing of large numbers of people helps keep the tourism industry efficient. But what happens to relationships, the ones so often characterised as dehumanising, massified, alienated in the tourism literature (MacCannell, 1975; Meethan, 2001; Smith, 1977) when good hosting, good linguistic hospitality, to use Ricoeur's phrase (Ricoeur, 2004), encounters what we might term good linguistic guesting, encounters people who have taken it upon themselves to learn and to use the language of the destination? What happens when tourists taken it upon themselves to step outside of their own everyday language habits, when tourists don't assume that everyone will speak English, or that theirs will be the language spoken, but when they bother to deepen their potential for relations with another place and people?

Beyond this, other questions are raised: Do the multilingual, intercultural environments of tourism encompass wider, and more complex modes of being? Urry asks the question 'what happens when people travel?' (Urry, 2002). Here, I ask, in the contexts of complex mobilities and intercultural encounters: What happens to us and to others when we attempt caffè over coffee, se faz favor over please? Why is it that that most maligned of language tasks – learning to order or offer a cup of coffee or a beer in a tourist language – is an enduring feature of tourist life? Who are we and who are others in this expression of a relationship?

Languages, Tourism and Everydayness

In focusing on tourist language learning and on an anthropology of the guest, it is worth stating that I understand intercultural communication as an everyday quest, amongst many other things, for alterity and as an encounter with other ways of living and speaking and acting. Such a quest, or engagement with the shifting realities of social life leads to a re-attunement of the whole being, to an education of attention that does not change who we are, but expands our horizons and enskills us to dwell in different worlds. Intercultural communication is the process of embodied learning with languages. It is embedded in everyday life and takes on particular material and cultural shape within tourism. It is not, to repeat, a set of competences or add-on skills.

I am consequently interested in the ways in which languages and tourism, as forms of intercultural learning, shape the everyday life of tourism, its tactics and strategies (de Certeau, 1984). I see intercultural communication not as some nirvana of toleration and harmony where all people will perfectly comprehend each other's different patterns of behaviour with a high degree of self reflexivity, but rather that intercultural communication is the human struggle to make meaning culturally and dialectically out of relationships between people, places and praxis. And culture, following Ingold, does not lie in 'some shadowy domain of symbolic meaning, hovering aloof from the hands on business of practical life, but in the very texture and pattern of the weave itself' (Ingold, 2000: 361). As such, this dialectical process indexes the crafting of new patterns and forms of social and material life and of language, out of our dwelt relationships with all around us and to hand.

Other languages, in other people and in other places, offer a change from the routines of our everyday language and our everyday lives. They offer new perspectives and new places to dwell, temporarily. They offer new homes in an age when home is no longer fixed but is made up – as hooks says (hooks, 1991) of multiple locations or as Said says: 'Homes are always provisional' (Said, 1999: 185). Some aspects of the routines and habits of our lives are suspended and remade in fresh yet familiar ways whilst on holiday. We may still wish for our morning coffee, but we will ask for it in a different way, using different words and gestures, paying for it perhaps at a different point in the procedure, feeling a different weight of cup or thickness of crockery in our hands and against our lips, a different taste in our mouths and other sounds of language in the conversations around us and in the newspapers opened at the bar. The first time we try to make our order it may be difficult, a risk, with no real expectation of success, but as time passes, we become more practised, even fluent, in this simple routine language task of daily tourist life.

But this is not the only direction to cultural change that we may trace here. Through the things seen and done, the habits changed, the people encountered, the food tasted and the language spoken, changes may enter life back at home. The world and its languages are brought home. Diets may change subtly, food tasted at a distance may be sought out and purchased at home, shared with friends and family, souvenirs may be of an everyday practicality – bowls, cups, cookware, modifying the modalities of everyday life. And the languages may linger. It is in the utter ordinariness of everyday life that we might find signs of newness and of transformation. There may be a new relationship with people and places that has been fostered through the intercultural encounters that inevitably come with tourism. These may lead to the resolve, for our purposes, to take up language classes or persevere with home language learning kits, tapes, videos, books and the internet. All of these aspects bring with them changes that pursue other, better ways of living life. They are often quite subtle. It may take years of return trips to the same place for the language learning to begin, or it may happen quickly and determinedly, as a result of a desire to enter more deeply into relation with people and place.

Under such a view of the possibilities afforded in tourism for cultural change, I regard attempts to manage away intercultural difference and linguistic diversity as removing certain crucial dimensions and opportunities for encounter and for imagination from the tourist experience. In short, smoothing out the intercultural bumps in languages and tourism itself places significant obstacles in the path of the creative processes of culture, closing down options and imaginative possibilities for cultural change in favour of the single of trope of well-meaning or not so well-meaning economic progress.

And there is much more to tourism and to languages, and the learning of both.

Dwelling Perspective

In the chapter 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking' Heidegger reflects on the relationship between language, building and dwelling, by pointing to the German word bauen – to build, as originally meaning to dwell:

What, then, does Bauen, building, mean? The Old English and the high German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbour. The neighbour is in Old English the neahgebur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller. The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby. The verbs buri, bueren, beuren, beuron, all signify dwelling, the abode, the place of dwelling (Heidegger, 1971: 144–5).

The older meanings of dwelling, encompassing neighbourliness, safe keeping, remaining at peace in a place, have fallen in to oblivion. Any attempt at construction, at building – physically or through thought – argues Heidegger is inescapable from dwelling as 'to build is in itself already to dwell (Heidegger, 1971: 146).' To see tourism and language learning simply as constructed, cultural activities – activities of building – is to miss the deeper significance of the ways in which tourists and tourist language learners, set apart temporarily in another place, begin by finding ways of dwelling, of preserving and sparing. 'The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us as soon as we reflect that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth' (Heidegger, 1971: 147).