Language needs in the hospitality sector in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Source: paddleinspain.com)

Multilingualism means business. The more foreign language skills are availalble to a company, the better it will be prepared to meet customers’ needs. In our globalized world, multilingualism is key and English is no longer enough. In this sense, companies are seeking to provide a better service by speaking other languages.

This phenomenon is even more important when it comes to the hospitality sector, as we found in our study about Language Needs in Tourism Enterprises in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia (Cañas & Pérez, 2014). Our research focused on the linguistic strategies that tourism enterprises based in the region of Pallars Sobirà (Catalonia, Spain) follow in order to improve their services.

Globalization does not only occur in mass market destinations. It can also be perceived on a smaller scale in countries and regions off the beaten track. How can the owner of a small cottage in a rural area be linguistically prepared for the arrival of foreign tourists from distant countries? Language strategy is the answer.

In our research, we found that an overwhelming 78% of the participating companies are aware of the importance of multilingualism. This is not surprising as nowadays, the visitors to Pallars Sobirà are very diverse: in addition to domestic tourists from Spain, visitors include French, British, Israeli and Russians. According to statistics from the Pallars Sobirà Tourist Information Office Network, the region received nearly 13% international tourists in 2013.

Most tourists visit the region due to white-water rafting competitions. The region is famous for championships such as the Freestyle Spanish Cup or the Noguera Pallaresa International Rally.

In the hospitality industry, there is a general awareness of the scarcity of language skills and most of the companies do not at present have any language strategy – despite their high levels of awareness that such a strategy would be desirable, as mentioned above.

On the other hand, companies with an existing foreign language policy also admitted that they still need more foreign language training. Owners and managers reported that they had come across difficulties with foreign tourists due to this fact and, as a result, many believed they had lost business opportunities.

Regarding the promotional strategy, many companies revealed that their website is already displayed in foreign languages (English, French and German are the most common ones).

Although many companies have their website and promotional information adapted to foreign clients, they need to make an effort in terms of accuracy and correctness. Enterprises must present their best image and in order to have effective content authors need to know how to write for the web, and how to manage the process of text revision, validation and publication.

Accuracy was also an issue with the paper-based information displayed at the hotels, hostels or inns. Often, this was not user-friendly for foreign tourists, except for those companies in which the restaurant menu is provided in English (and even in Hebrew in some cases).

Companies such as the ones participating in our study need to develop their own language management strategy by selecting from a range of various language measures. How to start? Using local agents who speak the target language can be the first step in opening up a new and unknown market. Additionally, it is important that regional institutions invest in the implementation of policies focusing on language training and facilitate recruitment. An example can be found in the Generalitat de Catalunya Strategic Tourism Plan for Catalonia 2013-2016 in which training in language skills is described as one key component within the excellence programme.

Reference

Cañas, J. & Pérez, L. (2014). Language Needs in Tourism Enterprises in Pallars Sobirà, Catalonia. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.

Yangshuo’s West Street (Source: chinatravelca)

Tourism has been found to be beneficial for minority language maintenance in a number of contexts from around the world. For instance, Anand Torrents Alcaraz has recently shown here on Language on the Move that the growing tourism industry in the Pallars Sobirà region of the Spanish Pyrenees extends the range of uses of Pallarès, the local dialect of Catalan, beyond its traditional rural-agricultural domains. Similarly, PhD research by Yang Hongyan has demonstrated that the award of World Heritage status to the city of Lijiang in Yunnan province in China has provided a significant boost for the maintenance of the Naxi language (Yang 2013). However, it is not always the case that the local minority language benefits from the development of tourism in a minority area, as a fascinating case study of West Street in Yangshuo Town in the Guilin district of Guangxi Province in China demonstrates (Gao 2012).

Yangshuo was one of the first backpacker destinations to emerge in China and the frequency with which Yangshuo is featured in English-language travel reports is out of all proportion to its small size, as Xiaoxiao Chen found in her study of representations of Chinese people and languages in English-language newspaper travel writing (Chen 2013). Yangshuo is typically represented as “easy,” “accessible” and “English-speaking” to English-language audiences, as in the following example (quoted in Chen 2013, p. 207):

[Yangshuo] is the most accessible destination in China for independent foreign travelers, offering accommodation across all ranges, an eclectic array of restaurants with English menus and English-speaking tourism service providers.

However, catering to the international tourist market through the provision of English-language services is only one part of the success story of Yangshuo. Capitalising on its popularity with international tourists, Yangshuo began to strategically associate itself with English-speaking visitors in its marketing efforts directed at domestic tourists, as in the following strategy paper (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 343):

We should fully explore the opportunities of mixing Chinese with western cultures by strategically integrating more western elements into local Yangshuo culture.

As a consequence of this branding strategy, part of the attraction of Yangshuo for domestic tourists now is the presence of English in the linguistic landscape, as a tourism site points out (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 336f.):

Yangshuo has picturesque scenery and rich cultural heritage. The most famous is the ancient stone street, West Street, which has many craft shops, calligraphy and painting shops, hostels, cafés, bars, and Chinese kung fu houses. It is also the gathering place for the largest number of foreigners – more than twenty businesses are owned by foreigners. So the place is called the ‘Foreigner Street’. And since all the locals can speak foreign languages, it is also called the ‘Global Village’. Another attraction is the study and exchange of Chinese and foreign languages and cultures. Chinese people teach their foreign friends Chinese cultures including its language, calligraphy, taiji, cooking, chess; at the same time foreigners teach Chinese people their languages and cultures, so that both finish their ‘study abroad’ within a short time.

The presence of English in the local linguistic landscape is continuously stressed in marketing materials, such as this one from the Yangshuo Tourism Bureau (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 345f.):

Yangshuo is a good place to cure your ‘dumb English’ and ‘deaf English’. At West Street, you can always see West Street people talking in fluent English with western travelers for business or just having small talk. Even old grannies in their 70s or teenage kids can chat [Chinese original: 拉呱 lā guǎ] with ‘laowai’ [foreigners] in English. Many western travelers say they just feel no foreignness here. West Street is the largest ‘English Corner’ in China now.

One could assume that in this ‘culture- and language-rich’ tourist destination, local languages are also being strategically incorporated, particularly as Yangshuo is located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the home of the Zhuang ethnic minority. However, this is not the case. In contrast to the ubiquitous focus on English, the local language, Zhuang, the local dialect of Chinese, and other local minority languages present in Yangshuo (Yao, Hui, Miao, Tibetan, Dong and others) are systematically erased: their existence is simply never even mentioned in tourism materials about the area.

Even if the local dialect is mentioned, as in this blog post by a visitor to Yangshuo (quoted in Gao 2012, p. 348f.), it is to be denigrated as not locally appropriate:

You must hold a CET-4 certificate, with relatively fluent spoken English, because at West Street, or just at countryside farmhouses of Yangshuo, even an old grandma or an egg-seller from a rural family could surprise you with their amazing English and at least another foreign language. Next of course you should know Cantonese, kind of an official language here, ‘cause more than half of the xiăozī [=cool person; yuppie] are from Guangdong. The third comes Putonghua, better with Beijing accent. The local dialect just does not work there.

In contrast to Pallars Sobirà or Lijiang, in Yangshuo tourism has done nothing to improve the status of local minority languages. On the contrary, as English takes on the function of indexing not only the global but also the local identity of Yangshuo, it is English that becomes a marker of local authenticity in the global village.

References

Chen, Xiaoxiao. (2013). Opening China to the Tourist Gaze: Representations of Chinese People and Languages in Newspaper Travel Writing since the 1980s. PhD, Macquarie University.

Gao, Shuang (2012). Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (3), 336-357 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00534.x

Yang, Hongyan. (2012). Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang. PhD, Macquarie University.

Actress Noemí Busquets as the wise yet naughty Esperanceta Gassia at the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu during the theatrical night visit to the ethnographic museum of Esterri d’ Àneu in Pallarès

When thinking of promoting tourism in a mountainous area of the Catalan Pyrenees it might seem as if using Pallarès, the local dialect of the Western Catalan type, with very specific vocabulary that visitors from other Catalan-speaking areas are not familiar with and which has been traditionally linked to rural and traditional lifestyles, would make little sense.

Nevertheless, much is to be gained by resorting to this local variety of the Catalan language in touristic activities in the area of Pallars Sobirà… why is that? Well, surprisingly, globalization is the answer.

One of the things that happen in the globalized touristic use of languages, according to authors such as Jaworski and Thurlow (2011) is the “commodification” and “recontextualization” of language. That means, language becomes a commodity in tourism … Aloha in Hawaii and Namaste in Nepal add authenticity to cultural visits, which is always a key asset in tourism. Beyond greetings and occasional language-learning through touristic “grazing” and “gazing”, though, tourism naturally creates new contexts for cultural phenomena and it currently values (oral) intangible heritage greatly. In fact, intangible heritage becomes visible precisely thanks to tourism. Pallarès is, in this sense, an intangible heritage of great value due to its connection to the authentic culture and territory of the Pyrenees.

According to dialectologists (Veny, 1993), Pallarès displays the marks of languages that were spoken before Catalan in the Pyrenees; mainly Basque, which vanished around the 8^th century AD due to the Romanization process, but which endured in “isolated” mountain valleys of the Pallars until the 10^th century, leaving a strong imprint on place names specially.

Mountain regions are ambivalent: either mountains and valleys “isolate”, or they “link” populations, villages, and cultures. So, when researching in order to assess the potential value of Pallarès in the promotion of the rich touristic offer of the Pallars Sobirà region (a land with prime adventure sports environment and unique cultural offers from Romanesque art to gastronomy) I asked cultural anthropologist and director of the Ecomuseu de les Valls d’Àneu Jordi Abella about this. Mr. Abella told me that “the villages of the Pyrenees in the 19^th century were already connected to European capital cities such as Madrid, Paris and Barcelona” and that too long a “good savage myth à la Rousseau had lived on to give a false romantic image of the Pyrenees” based on cultural purity due to isolation.

In a way, both isolation and globalization are forces at play here: isolation is evidenced by the fact that Basque lived on for 200 years in the Pallars; and globalization is evidenced by the fact that people changed to a common language – Catalan – which they could use at fairs and for trading.

Poster of the theater and dance festival “Esbaiola’t” in Esterri d’Àneu. The verb “esbaiolar-se” is unknown in other varieties of Catalan and means “to clear one’s mind” as well as “to clear up the mists (weather)”

Catalonia as a whole is going through what some have called a “thirst for history” (Toledano Gonzàlez, 2004). Catalans are more inclined to consume and discover more about their own culture at the current history-defining moment in which a Catalan vote for self-determination is being discussed. This creates a context that naturally invites greater use of Pallarès as Actress Noemí Busquets (who plays the role of a Pallarès-speaking witch-like wise and wacky lady that confronts local and global values during the night visits to the Eco Museum of the village of Esterri d’Àneu) emphasises: “now I feel that it (Pallarès) is better appreciated by visitors”.  And the fact is that 63% of the visitors coming to the Pallars region are from Catalonia (Boyra & Fusté, 2013), and mostly from the metropolitan area of Barcelona. What is it that Pallarès can offer them?

When in 1913, the philologist Pompeu Fabra wrote the Orthographic Rules of Catalan and later on the General Dictionary of Catalan Language (1931), he based them on the Eastern Catalan dialect – the one spoken in Barcelona – and left aside most vocabulary of other dialects and almost completely ignored Pallarès. Now, as a consequence of this, people coming to the Pallars get surprised by Pallarès. While queuing up at a grocery shop in the beautiful village of Esterri d’Àneu, a spontaneous conversation on dialectology started: a woman shared that when she got married to her Pallarès husband and moved to his village, her mother-in-law once asked her to fetch the “llosa”. “Llosa” in Catalan means “stone slab”; so, she continued “I was hoping that the stone slab wouldn’t be too heavy”. To her relief she later found out that “llosa” in Pallarès means “ladle”.

Pallarès brings back to Catalan-speaking visitors, a richness of vocabulary that they would otherwise ignore. When I asked Yolanda Mas, tourism specialist of the city hall of Sort (the capital of the Pallars Sobirà) what she thought of promoting Pallarès through tourism, she said that “it is an endangered resource that we should definitely invest in”. Nowadays, the visitors to the Pallars Sobirà are very diverse; from French and English to Spanish, Israeli and Russians; so the linguascape of the Pallars might become even more complex soon, and while offering touristic activities in Hebrew or Russian may respond to the economic need of the moment, offering activities in Pallarès Catalan in addition to activities in Standard Catalan and other languages, will be proof that “identity sells” while being at the same time a necessary expression of authentic identity.

References
Boyra, J. & Fusté, F. (2013). Anàlisi dels instruments d’ordenació i dels recursos territorials i l’activitat turística a la comarca del Pallars Sobirà GREPAT/ Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona

Fabra, P. (1913). Normes ortogràfiques. Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona.

Fabra, P. (1931). Diccionari general de la llengua catalana. Llibreria Catalònia, Barcelona.

Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2010). Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Towards a sociolingüístics of Fleeting Relationships (From: Handbook of Language and Globalization, edited by Coupland, N.) Wiley- Blackwell Publishing ltd. West Sussex, UK.

Toledano Gonzàlez, L. (2004). Atles del Turisme a Catalunya mapa nacional dels recursos turísitics intangibles. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona- Grup de Recerca Consolidat Manuscrits / Generalitat de Catalunya.

Torrents, A. (2014). La variant dialectal pallaresa com a bé immaterial de la marca de turisme cultural “Pallars”. Creació i comercialització de productes turístics. Quaderns de recerca Escola Universitària Formatic Barna, Barcelona.

Veny, J. (1993). Els parlars catalans (Síntesi de dialectologia) Editorial Moll, Mallorca.

Partnership with H.I.S. Tours

We have partnered with H.I.S. Tours Co., Ltd. to deliver the upcoming forum featuring former Prime Minister His Excellency Mr. Abhisit Vejjajiva and Professor Ingrid Piller of Macquarie University on Tuesday 02 July. Recognizing the importance of evidence-based research into linguistic diversity to the tourism industry, H.I.S. Tours has agreed to make a significant financial contribution to the forum. In recognition of the contribution from H.I.S. Tours, the forum is now titled H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand.

Founded in Tokyo in 1980, H.I.S. Tours has 147 branches in 107 cities abroad and 279 retail stores in Japan today. Therefore, serving the needs of their linguistically and culturally diverse customers in a wide range of linguistically and culturally diverse contexts is what H.I.S. Tours does on a daily basis. Therefore, it is of high importance to H.I.S. Tours to support academic research addressing linguistic and cultural diversity, as Bangkok-based H.I.S. Managing Director Mr. Makoto Kokubo explained to Dr. Kimie Takahashi.

The H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand will provide a unique opportunity for academics and industry leaders to gather together and seek ways of addressing language-related challenges in the Thai industry.

Mr. Kokubo will join the panel of experts, which also includes representatives of the Siam Society and VisitAsian.com to engage in this unique research and industry dialogue. Mr. Kokubo is exceptionally well-placed to contribute as H.I.S. Tours has been operating in Thailand in since 1997.

Updates on the H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand

CHANGE OF VENUE: Due to high demand, the venue has been changed from the Hall of Fame to the Auditorium (B Building) to accommodate more participants.

REGISTRATION: 250 registrations have been received so far and registration will close on Monday, 01 July. To reserve your seat, please send an email to abacforum@gmail.com.

DATE: Tuesday 02 July, 16:00 – 19:30 | VENUE: The Auditorium, B Building, Hua Mak campus, Assumption University

Barely legible today but evidence of ‘super-diversity’ in the 9th century: Runic graffiti in Hagia Sophia

On a parapet in Hagia Sophia’s gallery there is an obscure little graffiti written in Viking runes and dating back to the 9^th century. All that is legible today is ‘alftan,’ which refers to the Norse name ‘Halfdan’ and it is assumed that it was part of a formula such as ‘Halfdan carved these runes’ – the medieval equivalent of the modern graffiti formula ‘XY was here.’

How did a medieval Viking get all the way to what is today Istanbul and was back then Constantinople, the centre of the Byzantine Empire, the most powerful metropolis on earth? Maybe Halfdan was a mercenary in the Varangian Guard. Drawn from all over Northern Europe, the Varangian Guard were an elite army unit serving as personal body guards of the Byzantine Emperor. The Byzantine Emperors felt safer with foreigners as body guards who had no local loyalties. Little is known about the motivations of the young men who left Northern Europe to serve far from home in present-day Turkey but I imagine the usual mixture of lack of opportunities at home and the lure of the metropolis – a lure so powerful that medieval Constantinople drew migrants from all across the known world to this multilingual and multicultural city.

Evidence of contemporary ‘super-diversity:’ Chinese flier in Antwerp (Source: Blommaert&Rampton, 2011)

The Viking graffiti in Hagia Sophia reminded me of the Chinese flier in a contemporary Antwerp shop window that Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton recently used as example to explain the scope of linguistic research under conditions of super-diversity. Arguing that the example – an ad for a room for rent – bears traces of worldwide migration flows which make language varieties and scripts globally mobile, they outline the theoretical and methodological implications of migration and globalization for contemporary sociolinguistic research. I largely agree with their conclusions but I cannot help but wonder that two qualitatively similar examples – Viking graffiti in 9^th century Constantinople and a hand-written Chinese flier in 21^st century Antwerp – have such different effects: why has sociolinguistics been oblivious to linguistic diversity through the ages and why is the recognition that linguistic diversity is fundamental to all research in language and communication relatively recent?

Why does evidence of contemporary linguistic diversity move us to re-think sociolinguistics in a way that evidence of linguistic diversity through the ages has not? I answered that question previously with reference to the position of key linguistic thinkers in monolingual environments. However, there is another answer, too, and – like the medieval Viking graffiti – it also stares you in the face here in Istanbul. That further explanation is that multilingualism has been actively expunged from the historical record.

Ottoman Turkish inscription above the gate through which Mehmed II entered the city: its Greek name is Χαρ[ι]σίου πύλη/πόρτα (‘Gate of Char[i]sius’) and its Turkish name is Edirnekapı (‘Adrianopole Gate’)

However, the transient nature of language is only part of the story why we fail to see linguistic diversity in the historical record. The other part of the story is that evidence of linguistic diversity has been systematically erased from the historical record.

This obelisk inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs has been part of Istanbul’s linguistic landscape since the 4th century when Emperor Theodosius had it brought in from Egypt. The pedestal with its bilingual Greek and Latin inscription was added at the same time.

When Halfdan wrote his Viking graffiti and, presumably, spoke some form of Old Norse with those of his fellow Varangians who shared his dialect, the main language of Constantinople – and the lingua franca of its diverse population – was (medieval) Greek. Latin was also widely used and then there were the languages of all the city’s migrants and visitors. Christian Constantinople was a hugely multilingual place.

The city’s linguistic make-up changed on May 29, 1453 when Mehmed II took the city: not only did the Christian city become a Muslim one – and the Hagia Sophia church a mosque – the city’s dominant languages also changed from Greek and Latin to Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

What did not change was the fact of the city’s multilingualism: Arabic was the language of prayer and religion, Persian was the language of the court and Turkish was the language of the troops. Greek found itself as the language of a now down-trodden and subjected population and, as before, there were many other languages spoken by the city’s diverse inhabitants: Armenian, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Russian and Serbian would have been particularly prominent.

The Turkish that came to predominate over the centuries as Istanbul’s lingua franca was itself a highly heteroglossic language. Ottoman Turkish was inflected particularly by Arabic and Persian but also by all the other languages of this great melting-pot city.

Arabic calligraphy in Hagia Sophia: Quranic verse inscribed in the dome

The city’s multilingualism and the multilingual character of Turkish officially came to an end with the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The new Turkey wanted to sever its links with its Ottoman and ‘Eastern’ past and wanted to become modern and European. The multilingual laissez-faire of the past was now seen as decidedly ‘backward’ and ‘Eastern.’ Languages other than Turkish started to be repressed, with Kurdish as the most well-known victim of the new repression of linguistic diversity by the state. Not only was Turkey going to have only one language – Turkish – but that language was going to be ‘modernized,’ i.e. rid of the traces of other languages, particularly linguistic traces associated with ‘the East,’ i.e. Arabic and Persian.

The most well-known aspect of the Turkish language reform is the abolition of the Arabic script and its replacement with the Latin script. In one fell sweep, modern Turks lost access to their written historical record. Another target of the language reformers was Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Such words were replaced with ‘Turkish’ ones or loans from ‘modern’ European languages.

The futility of this undertaking – even if lost on everyone but the philologist – is nicely encapsulated by the word for ‘city’: Ottoman Turkish used ‘شهر‎ şehir.’ Because of its obvious association with Persian ‘شهر‎  šahr’ the language reformers saw no place for it in ‘Modern’ Turkish and cast around for a ‘pure’ Turkish word. They found it in the ancient ‘kent.’ The irony is that ‘kent’ is iself a much older loanword from Sogdian, the lingua franca of Central Asia before the Islamic Conquest.

Multilingualism has made a powerful comeback thanks to the tourism economy: this restaurant menu sports entries in 10 languages. And, no, this particular dish doesn’t sound appealling in any of them …

The reform was “a catastrophic success,” as the Turkologist Geoffrey Lewis has called it. As a result, most contemporary Turkish speakers are cut off from their linguistic and cultural heritage predating the 1930s. A famous – and also ironic – example of the monolingualization of Turkish is the fact that a major 1927 speech by Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, has had to be ‘translated’ repeatedly into contemporary Turkish so as to remain comprehensible to contemporary Turks.

In Istanbul, as elsewhere, contemporary examples of ‘super-diversity’ – the Russian ‘Sale’ signs in the shop windows, the tourist communications in all the languages of countries with strong currencies, the handwritten Arabic ‘for rent’ signs, the Kurdish music stalls – are impossible to ignore. By contrast, the fact that super-diversity has been a characteristic of Istanbul-Constantinople-Byzantium since time immemorial is easy to overlook.

Monolingualism and the Turkish language – just as all other standardized languages – are invented traditions. Diversity is, in fact, the normal human experience, as the anthropologist Ward Goodenough, who passed away last weekend, pointed out back in 1976. A research agenda that takes linguistic diversity as the basis of sociolinguistic inquiry must also include the hidden histories of linguistic diversity and modernity’s attempts to erase diversity.

Jan Blommaert, & Ben Rampton (2011). Language and superdiversity Diversities, 13 (2)
Goodenough, W. (1976). MULTICULTURALISM AS THE NORMAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE Council on Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 7 (4), 4-7 DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1976.7.4.05x1652n

Linguistic Diversity and Tourism

FORUM DETAILS
Date: July 02, 2013 | Time: 16:00 – 19:30
Venue: The Hall of Fame, Assumption University, Hua Mak, Bangkok
RSVP: Open to public. Please Send an email to abacforum@gmail.com

Recent years have seen an unprecedented growth in tourism in Thailand. In addition to well-established markets such as the UK, Germany, Japan and Malaysia, rapidly increasing numbers of tourists are arriving from China, Russia and India. Towards the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015, both tourists, and tourism and hospitality workers are expected to arrive from newly emerging markets such as Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar, adding even more linguistic diversity to the already multilingual tourism landscape and peoplescape. The ongoing tourism boom thus presents both a tremendous economic opportunity and a linguistic challenge to the nation – how can Thailand effectively attract and cater for tourists from linguistically diverse backgrounds, and meet their needs and desires satisfactorily while ensuring their safety? Tourism is made up of language- or communication-based practices, be they tourist-service provider interaction, promotion of destinations, signage in tourist attractions or guidebooks. Yet, the role of language and communication in tourism has largely been left out of the ongoing discussion on the future of Thai tourism.

Co-hosted by the Graduate School of Business and the Graduate School of English, this special one-day forum is the nation’s first attempt to bring linguists, tourism scholars and industry representatives to tackle the challenge of increasing linguistic diversity in the tourism industry in Thailand.

TENTATIVE PROGRAM
4:00 – 4:15   Welcome note: President Brother Bancha Saenghiran
4:15 – 5:00   Commemorative Address: Former Prime Minister His Excellency Mr Abhisit Vejjajiva
5:00 – 5:45   Keynote Lecture: Professor Ingrid Piller, Macquarie University, Australia
5:45 – 6:45   Panel discussion: Moderator: AJ. Glen Chatelier, Director of the Office of International Affairs
6:45 – 7:00   Closing address: Dr. Kitti Phothikitti, Dean of the Graduate School of Business

Dr Xiaoxiao Chen on her graduation day at Macquarie University

Language on the Move proudly presents another new PhD!

Dr Xiaoxiao Chen graduated from Macquarie University last week. Her PhD was awarded for her thesis about “Opening China to the Tourist Gaze: Representations of Chinese People and Languages in Newspaper Travel Writing since the 1980s.”

Abstract

Since its opening up in the 1980s, China has become a major international tourist destination. This study examines the ways in which China has been represented as an international tourist destination since the 1980s both in tourism discourses emanating from the West, represented by travelogues from the New York Times (the NYT), and from within China, represented by travelogues from China Daily (CD).

Building on Said’s critique of Orientalism and applying the analytical toolkit of critical multimodal discourse analysis, the study reveals that Chinese people under the tourist gaze are represented in only a small number of ways: first and foremost, Chinese people are represented as destination scenery, appearing as symbols of timelessness, human circumstances, and objects in both newspapers. Meanwhile, there are different sub-themes in the two newspapers that fit together in framing Chinese people as scenery. In the NYT, ordinary people are portrayed as the ‘exotic’ touristified Other, faceless masses, and differentiated communities. In CD, they are depicted as cultural performers, community representatives, and displayers of ethnic costumes. Second, if presented as engaging in interactions with tourists, Chinese people are shown to be endowed with the subservient character of helpers, being cast in the roles of informants, guides, hosts, and servers. Third, in the NYT only, they are sometimes reversely represented as ‘foreigners’ in their own country who are portrayed as overtly reacting to American visitors. Another way to construct China as simple, exotic, and inferior is through the representation of its linguistic landscape, which is characterized as homogeneous, incomprehensible, lacking English, and lacking correct English.

Overall, the study demonstrates that contemporary travel writing in English, irrespective of whether it emanates from the USA or from China, contributes to the continuation of Orientalist discourses that represent Chinese people and China’s linguistic landscape as signifiers of the Other to be consumed by Western tourists.

The full text of the thesis is available for download here.

Aspects of Xiaoxiao’s research are discussed in these blog posts: “Orientalism and tourism” (English version and Chinese version) and “The exotic Chinese language.”

Xiaoxiao’s higher degree research was supported by a Macquarie University Excellence Scholarship and supervised by Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Kimie Takahashi.

Congratulations, Xiaoxiao!

The Omidvar brothers on the road: amazing feats of discovery and language learning?

In his most recent round of interviews with the magazine Særzæmin-e Mæn (“My Country”), Issa Omidvar, one of the two adventurous Iranian brothers who undertook a 10-year motorbike journey across the world (1954-1964), shares details of how he and his brother learned English and Spanish, the two languages they needed most for their long journey. Before they left Iran in 1954 they barely knew any foreign languages, so they took some English courses and managed to learn the language in less than three months.

After they set foot on Mexican soil, they learned Spanish, a language they did not know even a single word of. Issa Omidvar claims that, in two weeks, they were both fluent in Spanish and had no difficulty communicating with Mexicans, who went out of their way to welcome them to their country. He goes on to relate that after a month, they were even able to deliver lectures in Spanish for their enthusiastic hosts:

روزی که قدم به مکزیک گذاشتیم زبانشان را نمی دانستیم. اما در عرض پانزده روز توانستیم به زبانشان صحبت کنیم. ما حتی بعد از یک ماه توانستیم به اسپانیایی کنفرانس بدهیم.

[The day we set foot on Mexican soil we didn’t know their language. But within 15 days we could speak their language. We were even able to hold talks in Spanish after a month.]

Issa Omidvar does not share any details about their language learning methods and his account of the brothers’ language learning feats is certainly impressive. But is it really true?

We know for a fact that most language learners take much more than ‘two weeks’ to achieve even a modest level of conversational fluency. Yet, we should not dismiss Issa’s account as an exaggeration. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves as language educators faced with students who usually take years to achieve substantial proficiency, what can we learn from the Omidvar brothers’ account?

The situation described by Issa Omidvar seems to include crucial components of successful language learning: they were young and talented and they had a communicative need:

چون هم جوان و مستعد بودیم و هم واقعا احتیاج داشتیم.

[The reason is that we were both young and talented and we were really in need of the language.]

Reading carefully between the lines, one would be able to establish how imperative their ‘need’ must have been. They made documentaries on the road and held impromptu screenings in universities, halls and arts centers. They needed to know the language of the locals in order to charge an entrance fee and thus finance the next leg of their trip!

Examples of the kind of language learning described by Issa Omidvar can easily be found today. The Fluentin3Months website, for example, whose “language hacking tips” are provided by an alleged polyglot, promotes a more or less similar language learning experience. The first and foremost question that readers have when they arrive on the website is how is it really possible to achieve fluency in three months (or actually much less)? The website features interviews with people who claim to have reached conversational fluency in a language in three months or less, “thanks to a combination of passion for the language, full time immersion, and a general good knack for learning it.”

What this ‘knack’ entails is not usually revealed unless you buy one of their language learning packages. At the same time, one must not lose sight of the fact that this type of language learning, however effective it is claimed to be, is not for those who want to get an A in their language class, nor is it for those who want to learn a language to take an academic test, to write perfectly, to pass a class, or to use grammar appropriately.

If you need a language to use it in academic or professional contexts at any level of complexity, it seems unlikely that there is a way around learning a language the hard way.

The front cover of the tourist map of multilingual Macau

Last week I had the privilege of visiting the University of Macau and in Macau I discovered yet another unique variation on the many multilingual landscapes we have featured here on Language on the Move.

Macau, a former Portuguese colony, has been a Special Administrative Region of China since 1999. The official languages of Macau are Chinese and Portuguese. English plays an unofficial but highly prominent role: it is the medium of instruction at the University of Macau and at a number of secondary schools. Other schools use Cantonese as medium of instruction and there is one Portuguese-medium school.

Trilingualism in Chinese, Portuguese and English is just the beginning, though. The linguistic situation is further complicated by the diversity of Chinese and the importance of the tourism industry.

The version of Chinese that is local to Macau is Cantonese but Putonghua is gaining in importance. Macau has about half a million residents but welcomes a staggering number of tourists: close to 30 million tourists visit Macau each year. Most of these come from Mainland China and so it is not surprising that in tourism spaces I overheard much more Putonghua than Cantonese. Written Chinese, too, comes in at least three varieties: traditional characters, simplified characters and pinyin. Furthermore, pinyin looks different depending on whether the writer followed English-based or Portuguese-based conventions.

The languages of other tourist markets also feature with maps and signs in Japanese, Korean and Thai.

The linguistic landscape of Macau is thus extremely diverse and each tourist site has its own conventions, as the following examples demonstrate.

A-Ma Temple

Chinese inscriptions at the A-Ma Temple

The famous Taoist temple dedicated to the goddess of seafarers, Matsu, from which the name “Macau” is thought to derive, is enlisted on the UNESCO World Heritage List. On the day we visited it was crowded with Chinese tour groups. The languages on display were ancient Chinese inscriptions in stones and on the temple façades. The prayer tablets where the devout can record their wishes and prayers also seemed to be Chinese only (although there were hundreds of them so I cannot be sure that prayers in other languages were not also hidden away somewhere).

The direction and prohibition signs were either in Chinese only or in Chinese and English (of the non-standardized “Chinglish” variety). One stall selling incense sticks and other devotionalia featured Chinese and Thai signs. Portuguese and what might be called “standard English” were notable for their absence.

Our Lady of Penha Church

Latin and Chinese on a devotional card at La Penha Church

One of Macau’s many Catholic churches (Macau used to be the staging post for the Christianisation of East Asia and has the largest number of Catholic churches by square mile in Asia), Penha Church sits on a hill and affords an excellent view over the harbour and across the bay to the mainland. The church itself is not a tourist destination but the spiritual centre of a community of Trappist nuns from Indonesia.

When we visited, the church was empty. Outside, there were a few newly-wed couples in Western wedding garb who were out to have their pictures taken. As far as I could hear, they received their instructions from the photographers on how to pose in Cantonese.

The languages on the signage could not have been more different from the A-Ma Temple: inscriptions on the façade were also monolingual but monolingual in Portuguese rather than Chinese. Signs about the code of conduct came in three language combinations: Chinese-Only, Chinese-English and English-Chinese.

Signage relating to the spiritual life of the church was either predominantly in Chinese or English, with one or the other language predominating and a few expressions in the other interspersed. To my great surprise, I also discovered some Latin slogans on devotional cards. A collection box, which looked quite old and featured Portuguese, Chinese and English suggests that the English presence in Macau predates the tourism boom and globalized signage of the past decade.

Mandarin House

Trilingual poster at the Mandarin House about 盛 世 危 言 (Warning to a Prosperous Age)

The so-called “Mandarin House” is another UNESCO World Heritage listed building. It used to be the residence of the Qing dynasty reformer Zheng Guanying. When we visited, the building was deserted and other than the attendants we were the only people present making it a very serene space. Information and prohibition signs were relatively standardized and trilingual in Chinese, Portuguese and English although some prohibition signs were more haphazard and contained only Chinese and English.

What was most interesting was the posters about Zheng Guanying’s book Words of Warning to a Prosperous Age (Shengshi weiyan 盛 世 危 言). What little information about the book I could gather from the information panels suggests that it is a highly relevant text for Intercultural Communication Studies. One website sums up the argument as follows:

As a famous reformer of late Qing China, Zheng Guanying was the earliest advocate of representative and participatory political system in the 1870s, the earliest to call for “commercial warfare ” against Western economic imperialism, and one of the earliest to seriously study international law and its relevance to China’s national identity and foreign relations. He was also one of the earliest Chinese to emphasize the combination of Western medicine and Chinese medicine.

His ideas continue to be highly influential in contemporary China and a translation of Shengshi weiyan would be highly desirable. Unfortunately, I have not been able to discover an English translation. I hope this is not another case of “no translation;” if it is, a translation would be highly desirable not only for Chinese Studies but also for Intercultural Communication Studies.

Casinos

Official trilingual “no smoking” sign

A discussion of the touristic linguistic landscape of Macau would not be complete without reference to the casinos because that is where most of the 30 million annual visitors are headed. I got to visit two of them: the Venetian, which is operated by the Las Vegas-based Sands corporation and is an imitation of the Las Vegas Venetian, and City of Dreams, a joint venture between the Macau casino dynasty Ho and the Australian billionaire James Packer. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the gambling areas occupy only a relatively small part of the casinos and while that is obviously where the action is, I did not enter.

Casino resorts are intended to be spectacular and novel. The Venetian, for instance, looks like a cross between a baroque church and Venetian canals and plazas and City of Dreams features a huge fish tank with (digital) mermaids. However, when it comes to signage there is no trace of the spectacular and unique. In both casinos, commercial signage was completely standardized in the non-language of other global consumer spaces. Direction signs were also standardized in Chinese and English.

Portuguese, by contrast, only had a tiny presence on state-mandated signs, particularly the ubiquitous no-smoking signs, which are in Chinese, Portuguese and English. The biggest surprise were the emergency exit signs: they did not contain any English and were in Portuguese and Chinese only.

Linguistic Pragmatism

Analysts of multilingualism in Macau have described multilingualism in Macau as “an illusion” because official societal Chinese-Portuguese bilingualism is rarely undergirded by individual bilingualism. Indeed, all the people I had extended conversations with were either English speakers from Australia, UK and the USA or Putonghua speakers from Mainland China and Taiwan. With three exceptions none of these had learnt either of the two official languages (the exceptions being an American and a Tawainese who had learnt Cantonese and an Australian who had learnt Portuguese).

Despite the amazing multilingualism in the public signage it may thus well be that the various language communities largely keep themselves to themselves. The fact that each space I visited has its own language practices with regard to signage seems to point in the same direction. If so, it is a pragmatic approach that seems to work perfectly well as a way to manage linguistic diversity and public communication with multiple audiences.

Sociolinguistics of Amazing Thailand launched

The Language-on-the-Move team is proud to announce the launch of a new sociolinguistic research project entitled “Language, Mobility and Tourism: Thailand on the Move towards ASEAN 2015”. Funded by Assumption University of Thailand and led by Kimie Takahashi, the project explores the role of language learning and multilingualism in tourism-related workplaces in Bangkok. It is modeled on the language and tourism projects conducted by Ingrid Piller in Switzerland (with Alexandre Duchêne) and Australia (with Kimie Takahashi). The interactive project site is hosted by Language on the Move.

Starting in March 2013, the research team will interview and conduct fieldwork with up to 30 workers in a range of tourism-related industries (e.g., hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, spa and beauty businesses). They will also seek to collect comments from experts and officials in tourism-related organisations (e.g., Tourism Authority of Thailand, the Thai Hotel Association, the Ministry of Tourism and Sports). Key questions that will be addressed in this project include:

1. What kinds of linguistic challenges is Thai tourism facing in catering for international visitors?
2. What types of language resources are available and needed in Thai tourism?
3. Is there any relationship between language proficiency and mobility of workers in tourism?
4. As a holiday destination, how is Thailand represented globally?

As part of the project, Ingrid has been invited to visit Assumption University in July to jointly conduct a two-day workshop with the research team. The workshop will be designed to highlight the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to understanding tourism and language issues inherent in the industry. More information will be available at the project site shortly. Throughout the life of the project (March 2013 – August 2014), updates about data collection and collaboration with partners will be made regularly on its interactive website and through Facebook and Twitter.

Chinese: What does the Chinese language mean to Western tourists visiting China?

Ingrid’s blog post “Character challenge” has set me thinking about Chinese language learning these days. I have found her observation about learning Chinese characters as “the most intriguing pastime” particularly impressive, especially when I look again at the data I analyzed for my thesis. There I looked (inter alia) at the ways in which English-language travel writers describe their communicative encounters in China.

In my corpus, only few writers seem to have made any attempt to learn Chinese before they traveled to China. However, they usually have a lot to say about the English deficiencies they observe in Chinese locals (as is also the case in hotel reviews).

How does Chinese figure in English-language travel writing? Mostly as an absence. My corpus consists of travelogues from the New York Times and China Daily. Despite their different origins from outside and within China, both newspapers have little to say about any communication occurring in Chinese.

To begin with, Chinese languages tend to be lumped into one single variety, “Chinese.” Regional dialects and ethnic minority languages are generally rendered invisible.

Second, Chinese words or phrases are sometimes used as iconic tokens to refer to local cultural specifics and to signify authenticity. Examples include place names for which a conventional English translation exists such as Changjiang instead of “Yangtze River” and names of Chinese dishes such as xiao long bao (soup dumpling) or baochaoyaohua (fried pig kidney). Other Chinese terms that I’ve found in my corpus included Qipao (a type of clothing), Xiangqi (a game similar to chess), baijiu (an alcoholic drink), pipa (loquat) or shanzha (hawthorn). Instead of serving any communicative function, these snippets of Chinese languages act as “linguistic decorations.” They serve to inject some local flavor authenticating the writers’ touristic experiences and thus contribute to linguascaping the exotic in China.

Third, Chinese languages are also exoticized in meta-comments that make judgments about or express attitudes toward local linguistic practices, serving the purpose of drawing social boundaries and reinforcing similarities and differences between the Self and the Other. For instance, the Guilin accent is described as “fairly different” from Mandarin, Cantonese is labeled as “bird language” or the Jinan dialect is compared to Putonghua spoken by foreigners who cannot grasp the four tones. By recursive logic, such linguistic differentiation is transposed onto the differentiation of destinations and local people. Thus, Guilin is constructed as a peripheral destination; Cantonese speakers are rendered sub-human as their language is compared to animal sounds; and Jinan speakers are made to look foreign and non-belonging.

Finally, some travel writers playfully cross into Chinese languages to enact an elite identity of sophisticated travelers belonging to a global community of tourists. For example, in a travelogue about Yunnan, the travel journalist describes himself as greeting some pilgrims by saying “Tashi delek” (Tibetan greeting). By crossing into Tibetan, the writer momentarily embraces the identities of the Tibetan pilgrims but also maintains his identity as an American tourist. This instance of language crossing presents the travel writer as knowledgeable and well-travelled but not a cultural/linguistic imperialist.

So, what do Chinese languages mean to English-speaking tourists? It’s easy to say what they are not: languages that have any communicative value. Firmly assigned to the Other and lacking any intrinsic interest, they are reduced to commodified snippets serving to affirm touristic identities. One could almost conclude that travel to China is not about China but about the ‘me’ of the tourist.

Publications based on my research are forthcoming. In the meantime, I would refer readers to Jaworski et al. (2003) for further reading.

Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Lawson, S., & Ylänne-McEwen, V. (2003). The Uses and Representations of Local Languages in Tourist Destinations: A View from British TV Holiday Programmes Language Awareness, 12 (1), 5-29 DOI: 10.1080/09658410308667063

Who of these two men do you expect to speak better English?*

I am very much looking forward to attending the International Conference on Research and Applications of Intercultural Communication in Wuhan next week. By way of preparation, I’ve googled the conference hotel on tripadvisor and was disappointed to discover that the English-language comments were quite negative. Going by the ratings alone, the Chinese-language comments seemed to be much more positive. So what is it that bothers English speakers about the hotel that the Chinese speakers don’t seem to mind? You guessed it, it’s English!

“Its main drawback for western people is the total lack of English information. There is the major signage with Englsih, but few staff have much communication in English.”

“Reception staff does not speak English.”

“The hotel looks nice and the rooms are ok, however the English spoken is barely average.”

“Few staff speak English at all, and none that I encountered spoke it well.”

Examples could go on and on and I ended up browsing a variety of hotels in China just for language-related comments. What I discovered was an endless litany of English-related complaints. My impression is (and there’s obviously a research project here) that Western travellers to China mostly care about the English proficiency of staff when they assess the quality of a hotel and they generally assess the English of hotel staff in highly negative terms.

I am not aware of any research into the actual English language proficiency levels of hotel staff in customer service roles in up-market international hotels in China but I’d be extremely surprised if the situation was really as dire as it is presented in comments such as those quoted here.

The situation reminds me of the language panic about Asian teaching assistants that gripped US universities in the 1980s and that inspired the by-now classic intercultural communication research of Rubin (1992) and Rubin and Smith (1990). At that time, there were widespread complaints that American students couldn’t understand Asian teaching assistants and so weren’t learning anything. The researchers wanted to test whether the problem might be due not only to Asian ways of speaking but also to American ways of hearing.

The researchers audio-recorded a science lecture aimed at undergraduate students. The speaker on the tape was a native speaker of American English speaking in a standard American-English accent. The lecture was then played to two different groups of undergraduate students. In one case, the lecture was accompanied by the picture of a Caucasian woman and in the other it was accompanied by the picture of an Asian woman. Thus, the impression was created that a Caucasian woman was speaking in one instance and an Asian woman in another. Both women were shown in the same pose and had been rated as similarly attractive. So, we have one audio-recorded lecture spoken in Standard American English and two different visual signals: a Caucasian lecturer versus an Asian lecturer.

Can you guess where this is headed? Right!

The students who saw the Asian lecturer heard a ‘foreign’, ‘non-native’ or ‘Asian’ accent although none was present in the auditory signal. What is more, the perceived accent of the perceived Asian lecturer led to reduced comprehension. The students rated the quality of the lecture and the quality of their learning experience much lower when they thought it was delivered by a speaker with a foreign accent.

Is the same going on with hospitality workers now? Western customers expecting they’ll have a hard time understanding Chinese hotel workers? And this expectation becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy? I’ll find out next week, I guess.

If you are interested in learning more about performance and perception in intercultural communication, you could read the chapter about “Intercultural Communication and Exclusion” in my book Intercultural Communication or you could attend the pre-conference workshop devoted to “Why westerners don’t understand the Chinese: Intercultural communication between performance and perception,” which I’ll conduct at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law on Thursday, November 15, or the repeat at the University of Hong Kong on Tuesday, November 20.

* Both men are German politicians and native speakers of German. Phillip Rösler (l.) is Vice-Chancellor of Germany and Guido Westerwelle (r.) is the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Rubin, D. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants Research in Higher Education, 33 (4), 511-531 DOI: 10.1007/BF00973770
Rubin, D., & Smith, K. (1990). Effects of accent, ethnicity, and lecture topic on undergraduates’ perceptions of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 14 (3), 337-353 DOI: 10.1016/0147-1767(90)90019-S

Bilingual signage in Lijiang: Dongba pictograms are in the blue banners (Source: Wikipedia)

The next seminar of the 2012 series of Applied Linguistics seminars at Macquarie University will be held on Tuesday, September 18:

Naxi, Chinese and English: Multilingualism in Lijiang

When: Tue 18/09, 1:00-2:00pm; Where: W5C 221

Presenter: Hongyan Yang, Macquarie University and Yunnan University of Nationalities

Abstract: This study examines language learning and language use among the Naxi, one of the 55 officially-recognized ethnic minorities in China. The majority of Naxi reside in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, Southwest China, a city which is attracting considerable domestic and international interest due to its UNESCO World Heritage status. This thesis attempts to situate multilingual language learning and use among the Naxi within the broader socio-political and economic contexts of Lijiang, contemporary China and global tourism.

This study employs a qualitative methodology to examine the relationship between the learning and use of the Naxi, Chinese and English languages as they are mediated by local beliefs and practices, state language policies and a rapidly globalizing economy. Specifically, the study draws on three sets of data to present a holistic picture of multilingual language learning and use: (1) language policy documents and government reports related to the learning and promotion of the Naxi, Chinese and English languages; (2) individual and group interviews conducted with 46 individuals in Lijiang and two other cities in Yunnan province between 2009 and 2010; (3) the interviews were complemented by participant observation in language classes at different levels of education from primary to tertiary.

The findings reveal that learning and use of Naxi, Chinese and English in Lijiang is embedded in a range of complex local, national and global factors. Although the statuses of all three languages have been legislated, the actual use of Naxi, Chinese and English in Lijiang, as well as the beliefs about these languages, is embedded in the ways in which they are used in schools and in the burgeoning tourism industry. The prevalent belief in Lijiang is that Chinese and English constitute a form of linguistic capital which enables individual, socio-economic mobility whereas Naxi is mostly seen as of symbolic value, tied to Naxi ethnic heritage and identity, and thus of limited socio-economic value.

However, these beliefs do not translate into straightforward language use practices. For most of the ethnic Naxi interviewed, Naxi is still the main language of the home and community and a marker of their ethnic identity. The relatively higher status of Chinese and English, by contrast, does not always translate into high levels of language use. These two languages are in the main restricted to the educational domain and to interaction with non-Naxi, particularly in the tourism industry.

Pompei Restaurant, Karachi (Source: fcpakistan.com)

A few days ago I had an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Having lived all my life in Karachi, I had until then never heard of the Pompei Restaurant. I was invited there by a visiting British academic, who declined my invitation to have dinner at our house and wanted to meet me at the Pompei instead. He seemed very surprised that I had never heard of the Pompei, which he seemed to know well.

Armed with the Google map directions, I still managed to lose my way but arrived a few minutes before my host.  Stepping into the restaurant was like going down the rabbit hole: I left Karachi behind and entered Europe.

The furniture, the wall hangings, the light music, and the candle lit tables all made me feel as if I had been transported to Italy. I was greeted very politely by the valet and the gentleman at the reception and was taken to the table my host had booked for us. I sat down and looked around. The bar with impressive brass levers to pour beer caught my attention. I asked the waiter for a glass of wine in Urdu but my eagerness was met with a thin smile and the English response: ‘Sir, wine is not served here.’

At that moment, my host arrived. Before sitting down, he handed a bag to the waiter. The waiter took the bag and returned with two menu cards. The menu card was in English only but, despite the fact that English is the main language I use in my professional life, I did not recognize the name of single dish on the menu except for pizza.

My host graciously helped me with the selection of starters and the main course when he realized my ignorance of Italian cuisine. Before the starters were served, my host’s bag was brought back to him and a bottle of wine emerged. The waiter apologized to my host and said he wasn’t allowed to pour the wine for him. My host smiled back in the manner of a man of the world who understands cross-cultural differences and filled our glasses himself.

While savouring the novelty of eating Italian food and drinking alcohol, I did not omit to look around me and take note of the people who had by now filled the place. The majority were foreigners but there were also a fair number of locals. Nearly everyone was drinking alcohol and smoking. English was the only language I heard.

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the novelty of it all, it was good my host kept the conversation going by telling me about his interactions with Pakistani scholars, who he had been visiting as a UN ambassador in the previous weeks. His role was to provide consultancy on improving academic standards. ‘You guys don’t know how to write,’ he observed casually. In my mind, I was busy adding all the other things I had discovered in the last hour only that we didn’t know.

When we finished the meal, I of course tried to pay my share. However, I have to admit I was grateful to my host that he wouldn’t allow me. I also have to admit that I tried my best not to stare when he put his hand in his pocket and pulled it back out with a fist full of currency notes. The bunch of currency notes was so thick that he had a bit of a problem picking out 7,000 Pakistani rupee notes out of this thick wad of US dollars. He gave those 7,000 rupees (ca. 70 Australian dollars) in the same manner as if they were worth 70 rupees. We had just spent around 7% of the average annual per capita income in Pakistan on a meal!

I thanked my host for his generosity and we parted ways.

Walking back to my car, I kept on thinking about my experience: I had just stepped out of Pakistan for a few hours without ever leaving Karachi. The material difference between the Pompei Restaurant and its surroundings was spinning in my head. I also thought about the role of language in this world of mirrors. Pompei exists in Karachi because of the development industry and the foreigners who come here as part of international institutions, which are supposed to help our poor economy. But are they really helping by creating islands of opulence that are unrecognizable to the average citizen? For me Pompei seems like a new sovereign state maintained by international money that has come to us from the World Bank, the IMF and other international bodies – ostensibly to reduce the deep and pervasive poverty in Pakistan but practically to be enjoyed by whom?

I was also musing on the intercultural nature of this encounter: a British and a Pakistani academic meeting in an Italy-themed space in globalized Karachi sounds very cool and postmodern and like a coming together in some global, hyprid, even ‘metrolingual’ space. But is that what had happened? To me, the encounter felt as one that accentuated difference and increased distance between people of different cultures. Had this encounter not turned me into someone utterly deficient: an academic who doesn’t know how to write? A customer who doesn’t know how to order? A local who doesn’t belong?

My last thought was about resistance: who is going to resist this new economy and its language? How can we truly achieve meaning in intercultural communication in a grossly unequal world?

Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad)

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train ride from central Bangkok. The special shuttle bus waiting at the station for bargain hunters was full of Japanese JT fans, and I struck up a conversation with an elderly Japanese couple. As they looked ‘non-tourist’ and at ease with the surroundings, I first thought that they were retirees living in Thailand. It turned out that they were actually tourists, and the main aim of their trip was to stay at the newly-opened prestigious Okura Hotel. They were enjoying the hotel, but “we actually prefer the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We stay there every time we come to Thailand”. Curious about “every time”, I asked how many times they’d visited. They looked unsure, replying “We’ve lost count…”. Finally, they figured that, since their first trip some 20 years ago, the husband, a retired real estate sales manager, had visited about 30 times, and his wife, a retired bank worker, over 40 times!

Seeing my disbelief, Mrs. Tanaka (pseudonym) enthusiastically explained how easy and pleasurable each of their visits had been. They quickly added that neither of them could speak English or Thai, but they have never had a serious problem or unpleasant experience. They love Thai culture and for Mrs. Tanaka, “Bangkok has become home”. Before we parted, they also talked about their wish to move to Thailand permanently, but that would happen, they explained, only after they had fully fulfilled their duty to farewell Mr. Tanaka’s elderly mother, who is 100 years old.

Although they claimed that they can’t speak any English, it’s probably the case that they can communicate in English to some extent. After all, they were able to get to the sales venue by themselves by using the BTS Skytrain where information signs are mostly in Thai and English. At the same time, their multiple trips to Thailand and their sense of belonging to the country despite their claimed lack of English or the local language, challenge the discourse of トラベル/旅行英会話 (English for Travel Purposes), a multimillion-dollar branch of the huge English teaching industry in Japan.

Compared to English for Academic Purposes, the king of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Travel Purposes (ETP) has received less scholarly attention. But ETP provides an amazing variety of courses and materials and has a strong hold on the psyche of many Japanese. What we find in cyberspace, for example, are countless numbers of ETP-related publications, websites of private language schools, vocational schools and universities that offer ETP courses, free and paid online lessons, seminars conducted by major travel agencies, websites run by travel English experts and enthusiasts, etc. Many 英会話学校 (English conversation schools) such as the three major schools, AEON, ECC and Gaba, offer ETP courses, and the discourse in the ads of these three schools is strikingly similar: ETP courses are for people who wish to make their overseas trip more enjoyable.

Gaba, for instance, recommends their ETP course for those who desire to (1) travel alone, (2) travel without guidebooks and (3) communicate with local people. Furthermore, ECC teacher Mika Fukube explains that ‘good English’ rather than ‘broken English’ will get tourists better service overseas:

海外旅行先でのホテルやレストランなどではブロークンな英語ではなく、しっかりとした英会話を話すことで、より良いサービスが提供されます.  (If you can communicate in proper English, not in broken English, you will be able to receive good service at hotels and restaurants in your destination.) [my translation]

Then, how much and how long does a tourist need to invest in getting that better, service-winning English? AEON offers a one-year ETP course and charges JPY118,440 for a weekly group lesson (plus the registration fee of JPY 30,000 and possibly extra for textbooks), while Gaba’s one-on-one course over 8 months is pricier with JPY437,850 for 60 lessons (plus JPY 18,900 for textbooks).

All in all, the ETP business in Japan thrives on promoting the idea of English as a magical tool to make overseas travel safer, more fun and meaningful.

The flip side of the discourse, however, works to instil a profound sense of anxiety and helplessness in prospective travellers as travelling overseas without English emerges as hard and dangerous, if not impossible. I’ve lost count of the Japanese people I’ve met, who shyly or anxiously claimed “I’m scared of going overseas because I can’t speak English.”

None of this linguistic burden, anxiety or any sense of exclusion was evident in my hour-long conversation with the Tanakas. They marveled at the land of smiles and all things Thai – its people, food and cultures – that are found alongside the wide variety of Japanese signs, products and services to which they can turn should the need arise.

Bangkok was recently named the world’s third top tourism destination for 2012, after London and Paris. Hedrick-Wong, MasterCard Worldwide’s global economic advisor, pointed out Bangkok’s “tolerant culture” as the winning aspect. In light of the Tanakas’ experience, Bangkok obviously offers more than ‘cultural tolerance’. It is a multilingual city where an elderly Japanese couple are able to enjoy their stay on their own, to have meaningful contact with the locals, and to be highly mobile, all without that so-called ‘service-winning proper’ English.

Indeed, the discourse of ETP makes little sense in the ‘real’ Bangkok as an overseas tourism destination; its linguistic landscape and multilingual service provisions help to make visitors welcome and demonstrate that in contemporary Asia you can get fantastic service without English.