Intercultural communication in tourism

The booming global tourism industry presents increasing opportunity for the study of languages and intercultural communication in the multilingual and cross-cultural encounters between tourists/guests and locals, amongst tourists, and amongst employees. This chapter outlines and critically evaluates three principal approaches to this end, each with a shared set of conceptual concerns, methodological strategies, and topics that may sometimes overlap. The tourism impacts approach addresses the positive and negative social and cultural effects of tourism through social psychological contact theory, phenomenological and existentialist traditions, studies of language attitudes and motivations for intercultural learning, linguistic and cultural commodification (notably in indigenous contexts), and tourist behaviour management. The language of tourism approach encompasses well-established sociolinguistic perspectives, together with critical discourse and critical language awareness, and postcolonial viewpoints. Finally, the intercultural encounters approach foregrounds ethnographic inquiry, and the concept of tourist talk (TT) in institutionalised settings. Limitations with each approach, and directions for future research, are noted. The chapter ends with a call to accelerate the development of the emerging decolonial agenda in studies of tourism, languages, and intercultural communication.