Linguistic commodification in tourism

Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/4, 2014: 539–566 Linguistic commodification in tourism Monica Heller, Joan Pujolar and Alexandre Duch^ene University of Toronto, Canada Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain Universit
e de Fribourg, Switzerland Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zones of francophone Canada in sites related to heritage and cultural tourism, we argue that tourism, especially in multilingual peripheries, is a key site for a sociolinguistic exploration of the political economy of globalization. We link shifts in the role of language in tourism to shifts in phases of capitalism, focusing on the shift from industrial to late capitalism, and in particular on the effects of the commodification of authenticity. We examine the tensions this shift generates in ideologies and practices of language, concerned especially with defining the nature of the tourism product, its public and market, and the management of the tourism process. This results in an as yet unresolved destabilization of hitherto hegemonic discourses linking languages to cultures, identities, nations and States. Sobre la base del nostre treball de camp realitzat entre 2002 i 2012 en llocs associats al turisme cultural a Su€ıssa, Catalunya i en diverses zones del Canad a franc ofon, en aquest article argumentem que el turisme, especialment el de les periferies multiling€ ues, constitueix un context clau per a explorar l’economia polıtica de la globalitzaci o en els seus aspectes socioling€ uıstics. Considerem que els canvis de rol que experimenten les lleng€ ues en el turisme s on indicadors de canvis de fase del capitalisme, en aquest cas del canvi del capitalisme industrial al capitalisme tard a, el qual te efectes importants en la mercantilitzaci o de l’autenticitat. En aquest article, examinem les tensions que aquests canvis produeixen en les pr actiques i ideologies ling€ uıstiques a mesure que els actors socials malden per definir la naturalesa del producte turıstic, el seu p ublic i mercat, i la gesti o del proces turıstic. Tot plegat comporta una desestabilitzaci o no resolta del que havien estat els discursos hegem onics que han lligat fins ara les lleng€ ues a les cultures, identitats, nacions i estats. [Catalan] A l’appui de recherches de terrain menees entre 2002 et 2012 sur des sites lies au tourisme patrimonial et culturel en Suisse, en Catalogne et dans differents espaces du Canada francophone, nous soutenons que le tourisme, en particulier en milieux peripheriques multilingues, constitue un secteur clef pour une exploration sociolinguistique de l’economie politique de la globalisation. En nous concentrant sur le passage du capitalisme industriel au capitalisme tardif, et en particulier sur ses effets sur la commodification © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 540 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE de l’authenticite, nous mettons en relation l’importance de la langue dans le tourisme avec les mutations du capitalisme. Nous examinons les tensions autour des ideologies et pratiques de la langue que genere ce changement, en particulier du point de vue de la definition de la nature du produit touristique, de ses publics et marches, et de la gestion du processus touristique. Il en resulte une destabilisation – encore irresolue – des discours jusqu’ici hegemoniques liant les langues aux cultures, identites, nations et Etats. [French] KEYWORDS: Tourism, commodification, authenticity, globalization, late capitalism 1. TOURISM, LANGUAGE AND THE PERIPHERY In this paper, we set up an argument which does not start with tourism’s interest for sociolinguistics, but rather follows a path of a question long of interest to sociolinguistics, and which leads us to tourism. All three authors have long been involved in exploring the role of language in nationalism, and in particular in those problematic zones where the canonical monolingualism of the nation-State is contested: multilingual areas, and linguistic minorization. Working in Switzerland, Catalonia and francophone Canada, we each saw emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s an increasing interest in the economic value of tourism, and in particular in the harnessing of national and regional multilingualism to the development of added value to the tourism product, as well as to its marketing.1 So we have seen Franco-Ontarians developing pageants, local festivals or Francophone tourist trails, Acadians building historic villages, museums of Catalan writers designing literary trails to discover the local landscape, and Swiss towns marketing themselves as exemplary bilingual contact zones. We argue that this trend encapsulates many aspects of the sociolinguistic changes brought about by globalization and late capitalism, particularly as they are experienced in multilingual peripheries. First, globalization affects the inherited interdependencies between metropolis and peripheries due to the fact that the territorialized State ceases to be the sole reference point in political and economic life. Secondly, late capitalism embodies transformations in the economic cycle that transforms not only what is being produced and how, but also the ways in which the economy sustains specific forms of social categorization and concomitant subjectivity, such as class and ethnicity. All these transformations involve language in different ways, given the central role played by language in the ideological (re)production of the nation-State, and by virtue of the fact that late capitalism places language at the centre of key sectors and modes of production (and indeed consumption). Linguistic commodification in tourism, we intend to show, provides a window onto the © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 541 complex interactions between all these factors, and therefore onto the crisis of early modern language ideologies positing a homology among standard language, monolingual speaker and national identity. To do so, we will draw on fieldwork conducted at different moments between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zones of francophone Canada (principally in Ontario and New Brunswick). While our active data collection collaboration was limited to a few visits, we have been sharing data throughout this period.2 The Swiss case is based on an ethnographic study of the Swiss National Tourism Board (hereafter NTB), which has been in continuous operation since 1917. It has always historically served as a strategic instrument for constructing an image of Switzerland as whole (not just its regions or specific localities) for an international audience. This is even more evident since 2002, when the NTB was formally linked to three federal agencies in charge of all dimensions of Switzerland’s international image, as well as international economic promotion, and the development of Swiss cultural activities. Currently, NTB’s main mission, as defined by the Swiss federal government, is to stimulate the demand for Switzerland as a travel destination, both for leisure and business. It engages in three key sectors of activity: 1. the production of promotional material (texts, brochures, website) regarding both Switzerland as a whole as well as its regions, cities and events; 2. the development, monitoring and expansion of key sectorial and national markets; 3. centralized customer service for general tourist information and for sales of tourism products, through a single call centre serving major European as well as domestic markets, and through online services. The Canadian material is drawn from a series of projects conducted in Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in areas suffering from economic restructuring and adapting to major shifts in federal government support for francophone minority communities (their institutions, their language and their culture). The projects focussed on several cultural and heritage tourism development activities in these areas, as well as on the economic and policy agencies at the municipal, provincial and federal levels to which they were connected. Here, we will draw briefly on one living museum in New Brunswick, constructed around the presentation of a theatre piece encapsulating Acadian history; and discuss in greater detail the process of development of a summer festival in rural Ontario. The Catalan data is mainly based on the analysis of a network of ‘literary houses’ devoted to literary authors, their work and their biographies. These sites underwent a significant transformation during the 1990s, from their earlier roles as archives in the service of philologists to literary museums. As local authorities began to assure them stable funding, they also directed them © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 542 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE to develop their potential as tourist attractions and local brands. The network espais escrits (‘written spaces’) thus developed the concept of ‘literary heritage’ with a specific focus on how literary works produce specific meanings and experiences attached to ‘place’ and ‘landscape’. In this context, literary museums were able to build on the national imaginaries developed through literature in order to construct specific representations of the Catalan landscape as inextricably linked to the Catalan language and culture. Although the network faced, and still faces, significant challenges to position itself in the tourist market, the notion of ‘literary landscape’ has galvanized philologists and cultural activists into producing new ‘literary trails’, ‘literary atlases’ and related online resources.3 These products show some of the ways in which linguistic nationalism renovates its arguments about the bond between language and territory, even as globalization transforms the ways in which places are both dwelt in and consumed. Although the types of tourism activities vary from one site to another, due to the different foci and scope of the projects, and to the political economic role of tourism in each sociolinguistic context, we believe that considering them together allows for transversal analysis of the ways in which the commodification of language and identity leads to certain types of tensions, and of the ways these tensions are linguistically managed (see section 4). These tensions involve difficulties in reimagining and putting into practice forms of symbolic capital formerly associated with politicized identities that have been traditionally constructed as ‘authentic’ and are now mobilized as commodities, that is, as exchange goods on a market. Symbols become products, tourist-host interactions become monetized exchanges; and cultural and political discursive fields become markets in ways that recall how former empires exoticized, exhibited and consumed their colonial subjects and their cultural expressions, whether internal or external. At the same time, the value of (national identity) objects and performances on the market retain their currency outside the economic market, that is, on the initial conditions of their constitution as political rallying points. The shift involves managing that contradiction, and reimagining the nature of objects and activities – all processes, as we will show, fraught with complications. 2. CAPITALISM, PERIPHERIES AND TOURISM Globalization entails a time of reconstitution of time/space relations at a worldwide scale driven by specific economic and political trends connected to capitalist expansion. As such, it unsettles long-established centre-periphery relations constituted under the aegis of nation-State industrial capitalism (Hechter 1975; Kelly-Holmes and Pietik€ ainen 2013). Before turning to the manifestations of this unsettling in multilingual peripheral tourism sites, we will trace the development of these centre-periphery relations throughout what we see as the three main phases of capitalism: early, welfare and late capitalism © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 543 (Harvey 1989; Rose 1993; Bauman 2000). We shall define all these concepts at the same time as we discuss how these phases are also characterized by specific linguistic ideologies and regimes, as well as forms of tourism and travel. Early capitalism can be characterized in simple terms as the period in which capitalist production achieved not just economic domination, but also political emancipation during the 18th and 19th centuries, through the constitution of nation-States in Europe and North America. The key characteristic of nationStates was the building of national markets, organized around metropolitan centres, unified through homogenization and standardization of language and culture, and through citizen participation in national institutions (political structures, education, the military, the media, State bureaucracy, etc.). Metropolitan centres thus exerted a strong gravitational pull over peripheries for people and resources, while peripheries were also exploited as zones of supply of labour and resources. This created a characteristic tension between centres and peripheries, providing some of the conditions for the social conflicts and cultural changes that defined modernity. Thus, peripheries were subordinated to the centres’ interests, and distant not only spatially, but also socio-temporally; this relation was legitimized through the construction of the periphery as a cultural ‘other’ (Hechter 1975; Kelly-Holmes and Pietik€ainen 2013). It is important to bear in mind that, as Kelly-Holmes and Pietik€ ainen (2013) have argued, the notion of periphery is mainly relational, not descriptive. Peripheries become meaningful and accessible through their connection, arguably subordination, to a centre. This is why it makes sense to treat as peripheries regions otherwise located in first-world contexts: any part of francophone Canadian space (and its traditional rural bastions), as peripheral to Anglophone-dominated Canada; Catalonia as a Spanish political periphery built more on military than economic means; and Switzerland4 that, despite its status as a prosperous nation-State, has historically carved out a position amongst contending European powers as a financial, political, geographical and linguistic neutral space, serving frequently to facilitate either the circulation of resources among those powers, or their safekeeping. Language is one of the many ways in which the differences between centres and peripheries can be semiotically constructed, though linguistic ‘otherness’ must not necessarily be constructed upon the existence of distinct languages. The cases we examine here do involve however this specific form of linguistic difference that is eventually taken up as a component of this ‘otherness’. In these specific contexts, peripheral populations (or at least the brokers among them) must forcibly become bilingual, as they must master their own language and enough of the dominant one to be able to articulate with the metropole, and maximally, as they were situated at the outer frontier of the nation-State, they also mastered the language(s) of neighbouring areas on the other side of the border. These peripheries were then produced as places of linguisticallymarked difference, where languages became available in the ideological © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 544 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE struggles over modernity and tradition, thus mobilized in typical colonialist processes of exoticization, racialization and sexualization, when they were not produced as empty spaces or sources of threat. Williams (1975) argued that an important feature of the nation-State is the tension between the economic importance of urban-based industry and the bourgeoisie it sustains, on the one hand, and, on the other, the legitimizing role of the idea of an organic nation, rooted in the soil (thus justifying occupation and control of territory), and sharing timeless bucolic Edens which guarantee the purity and moral worth of the State. Although the city can arguably be used to construct national imaginaries touching on ideas of civilization and cultural or technical sophistication, this sophistication can also threaten the pure unsullied soul of the nation, and push it to the edge of decadence. The city also attracts people from everywhere, preventing it from safeguarding the uniformity and purity of the nation. That safeguarding happens in the country, close to nature, although life in the periphery also by definition lags behind modernity and progress. Peripheries, therefore, become available to be constructed as embodying a myth of national origins and lost paradises (see also Ebbatson and Donahue 2005). (They may also be the wastelands, where minorities are concentrated in industrial labour, and where the decadence of the city is contained in polluted, working-class neighbourhoods, with their ‘ethnic smells’ and disorderly streets, though it is largely the rural bastions which concern us here.) These tensions set up some of the origins of tourism itself. City-dwellers had to visit the rural bucolic periphery as a way of enacting the nation; and the exoticism of both the urban and the rural periphery made it available both (and paradoxically) as a place to go to escape the constraints of civilized society, and as a place where one could either directly consume nature and culture on site, on top of the more mediated consumption of resources and labour underlying the centre-periphery relationship, or escape the strictures of civilization. Tourism is thus one element constitutive of the centre-periphery relationship (indeed, it can be argued that the centre-periphery relationship is also a source of tourism), and linguistic difference is available as a resource to sustain this dialectical relationship. This relationship makes tourism interesting as an economic possibility at different times in different ways, but it remains nonetheless critical to the reproduction of peripherality and of peripheral zones themselves, even in areas where minority language movements ostensibly seek to transform themselves from someone else’s periphery into their own centre, using the logic of the nation-State to resist their peripheralization. This has worked in very different ways in the areas in which we have each long been doing fieldwork. Switzerland, as a European periphery, is one of the earliest examples of tourism as an industry, as late-19th-century and early20th-century European city dwellers sought the fresh air and pure nature of the Alps. In the same period, both English Canadian and American urban elites © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 545 sought out the francophone periphery of eastern Canada, by the sea or in the hills, and Catalan urbanites consumed their own countryside and sampled their cultural heritage through hiking clubs. In the post-World War II period, the elite tourism associated with early capitalism gave way to mass tourism. Mass tourism was enabled by the paradigm of welfare and labour relations that generalized the ‘holiday’, as well as by the Fordist logic of standardized mass production and consumption. Indeed Ford literally supplied the means (the car) that made peripheries attainable for consumption to the masses. Mass tourism drew crowds to Catalan beaches, Quebec lakes and Swiss hiking trails, in ways which played down cultural difference in favour of experiences of nature and escape from civilization and drudgery ‘packaged’ by international tour operators. At the same time, peripheral areas struggled to constitute themselves as ‘normal’ nation-States, working at building their own centres and peripheries by controlling multilingualism, largely through political means. Even Switzerland, with its constitutive multilingualism, organized that multilingualism as contiguous monolingual zones, working hard to develop means of distinguishing just which language should prevail over just which politicalterritorial units. After several decades of mass tourism, coincident with the apogee of industrial capitalism and the rise of the welfare state, by the 1980s capitalist expansion led to neoliberalization, tertiarization, and the globalized new economy, or what Harvey calls ‘flexible accumulation’ (1989: 141–172; see also Lash and Urry 1994). This period is characterized by the rapid growth of the service sector, combined with new patterns of mass consumption of ‘shortcycle’ cultural and manufactured products that seek to circumvent market saturation by focusing on customization and lifestyle marketing. Many authors locate the advent of postmodernity at this moment, characterized by Bauman (2000) as one in which consumption becomes the core process in the definition of identities and subjectivities. As transnational corporations move industrial production to developing countries, and the nation-State withdraws welfare protections, the economic basis of national citizenship is eroded. The very concept of ‘commodification’ emerges in this context (see below), as does the ‘heritage industry’ through Hewison’s (1987) work (although he initially misinterpreted the phenomenon as evidence of Britain’s nostalgia for its past glories, rather than the advent of the new forms of cultural consumption that are the object of this article). So, while linguistic difference had always had important political and economic implications for capitalist states and their citizens, these new political economic shifts have brought about specific sociolinguistic transformations that have recently captured our interest, as they displace issues of language and identity onto the logics of cultural production and lifestyle consumerism. ‘Commodification’ is the expression we use to describe how a specific object or process is rendered available for conventional exchange in the market. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 546 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE Although the concept harks back to Marx’s idea that capitalism was founded on the notion of turning work into a commodity, the word ‘commodification’ itself is recent, dating from the mid 1970s (Oxford Dictionary 2010). Thus, although capitalism is centrally about producing and distributing commodities, and has historically and characteristically expanded the scope of what can be turned into one, the concept as a nominalized process does not seem to appear until the process affects areas of life hitherto treated as ‘public’ goods and not as profit-making ventures. Thus, it has affected not just ‘language and identity’ (a comparatively late phenomenon), but also welfare provision (Henderson and Petersen 2001), policing (Loader 1999), higher education and skills training (Urciuoli 2008), bio-information (Parry 2004), nature (McAfee 1999), communicative practices in the media and service provision (Fairclough 1995; Cameron 2000), and heritage and culture (Hewison 1987; see also Heller 2010 for an overview of domains of linguistic commodification). Since the mid 1990s we have witnessed how the globalized new economy and neoliberal policies shifted the grounds for understanding the nature of the nation-State and its centre-periphery relations in the three contexts studied. Many of our sites were hit by the closure of manufacturing industries or by the loss of the centre’s markets as international trade and overproduction brought down the price of agricultural produce. It was in this context that the State came up with economic redevelopment plans in which tourism was highlighted, and in which local identity appeared as potential ‘assets’ or forms of ‘added value’. The globalized new economy also shifts the position of peripheries: as the nation-State becomes increasingly unable to control market processes which require expanded and intensified global flows, old peripheries are often resituated as important transnational nodes. In this context, language became a potential means for representing locality even as it is being commodified in multiple other ways following the logics of the globalized new economy. We believe that this general commodification of language and identity complexifies and transforms modern ideologies linking language to (allegedly) authentic belonging, to the nation, the State and the land. Tourism is arguably the most important terrain for the development of these processes in our sites, as it turns in late capitalism to greater investments in symbolic added value and to niche markets, as manifested in particular in the growth of heritage and cultural tourism. A major element of concern is the way language and identity are mobilized as specific themes to create a sense of place (Pitchford 2008) and attract tourists, build attractions and make souvenirs. Such initiatives are often led by former language activists; but they involve very different ways of mobilizing their constituencies, and lead to new forms of local organization and to the development of new discourses. Language had previously been largely hailed as a cultural asset and an emblem to build community solidarity; but now it is also used to represent the community to tourists and to brand commercial products. In short, language, © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 547 together with its accompanying identity ingredients, is being turned into a commodity. Thus, over the last 15–20 years we have seen peripheral communities investing in tourist and heritage projects across the world, albeit in different ways as change is always uneven. Our three sites already help us capture some dimensions of this difference. They are certainly not representative of a typology of forms, but they are differently situated with regard to the role of multilingualism in their nation-States, and in the role of tourism in their peripheral economies. We need to track then, over those sites, how changes in what it means to be a periphery are linked to shifts in ideologies and practices of language in the globalized new economy, and notably linguistic commodification (see section 3 below). It is therefore important to examine ethnographically and in political economic terms what is available locally or regionally as a basis for developing products, services, producers and consumers. Each of our sites has had a different trajectory, because of different positions with respect to both the nation-State and the globalized new economy. 3. THE TURN TO LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION Our first example concerns policies put forward by the Canadian federal government with the participation of the minority Francophone cultural sector, largely in the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick. It is a straightforward example of how globalization and neoliberalism meet to reformulate the State’s investment in language, culture and identity. Francophone Canada has long been both a geographic and a social periphery, principally involved as a workforce in either primary resource extraction or its industrial transformation under Anglo-Canadian, British and Anglo-American ownership and management. Post-war economic expansion laid the basis for the emergence of a bourgeoisie, and the development of francophone (especially Quebecois) State-nationalism – and hence an institutional infrastructure legitimized by a discourse of authenticity. The deindustrialization of North America since the 1980s has thrown the economic basis of peripheral community reproduction into crisis, while global expansion has also made it difficult to sustain nation-State type markets. The neoliberalization of the State led to the withdrawal of funding for minority language maintenance, and turned it into funding for economic development. Under these conditions, tourism became attractive as an option, turning disaffected factories into entertainment centres, fishing boats into whale-watching cruisers, and community festivities into spectacles. Minority Francophone communities were hard-hit by outsourcing and the crisis of agriculture and fishing – jobs were lost, and many workers had to seek elsewhere for employment. At the same time, Canada’s federal government withdrew its support for francophone cultural organizations that had received State funding for decades. Federal policy then shifted to ‘Francophone © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 548 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE  (Reseau de developpement economique et economic development’: the RDEE d’employabilite) was set up as an interministerial body to support training, investment in tourism, the arts and information technology in these regions (Silva and Heller 2009). Local Francophone groups started to devise projects to attract the funding earmarked for such investments, and concentrated on francophone heritage. One specific site, ‘Le Pays de la Sagouine’ on the coast of New Brunswick, provides a good example. It offers the reproduction of a typical Acadian, postwar fishing village with actors engaging with visitors and artists offering Acadian entertainment. It is based on a literary work, La Sagouine, by Acadian writer Antonine Maillet. Literature has an established trajectory as a site for the construction of Acadian national identity, with Longfellow’s poem Evang
eline providing a foundational myth based on the deportation of Acadians in 1755. La Sagouine, a play published in 1971, successfully caught the public’s imagination as representing an Acadian people living through poverty and marginalization. The tourist site was open in 1992, mainly thanks to government funding, and has been struggling ever since to sustain itself as a tourist product that offers entertainment and authentic experience of this part of francophone Canada. On entering the premises, tourists are encouraged to discuss and exchange their sense of dialectal peculiarities in French. The play itself is written in Acadian French, and was heralded at the time of its original publication as proof that great literature could be written in the vernacular; indeed, that the vernacular encoded universal values that high culture often ignored. The site was thus an incarnation of a vernacular-speaking space. At the same time, in order to survive, the site had to turn to bilingualism; its promotional materials, including its website, were originally in French, but an English version was created in the early 2000s to appeal to a more general clientele. Catalonia provides interesting elements of contrast. First, it is a very wellknown destination within the mass-tourism industry, with an established profile within the sea-and-sun formula. Second, the industry has been run from the beginning by local Catalan speakers, as is also the case for the local agricultural, industrial and service sectors. Tourism alone provides around 11 percent of the Catalan GDP without the need for investing much in cultural attractions, with the important exception of Barcelona, whose cultural assets attracted small numbers of visitors until 1992 but which has since positioned itself strongly as a site combining leisure and Catalan art. However, in general, Catalan language and identity has not been prominent in Catalan tourism. To find developments in Catalonia similar to La Sagouine we must move away from the coast and the metropole to the many former industrial valleys whose economies have also gradually shifted to so-called ‘rural tourism’, mainly consisting of local farmers and entrepreneurs providing authentic countryside atmosphere, first to Barcelonans and increasingly to international tourists too. It is a product where language, tradition and nature play © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 549 Figure 1: Detail of the interactive Catalan literary map over the Montseny mountain range (www.mapaliterari.cat) important parts. In this context, away from the mass touristic flows, we found an interesting network of ‘literary houses’: cultural centres and archives devoted to writers. During the 1990s, these institutions developed a network called Espais Escrits (‘written spaces’), formally constituted in 2005, with the argument that the patrimoni literari (‘literary heritage’) was essential to understand the cultural meanings of the landscape and the territory. Figure 1 depicts a web resource where one can peruse a map to find sites connected with literary works, and read the poems or narrative fragments that referred to the place. The Montseny mountain range is a well-known motif of national poet Jacint Verdaguer. Landscape is, from this perspective, presented as an asset that can best be appreciated through the lens of the literary works of Catalan national writers, as was made explicit in this ‘literary geography’ website: Extract 1 La paraula, feta art, i el paisatge es juxtaposen en una simbiosi que aixeca acta notarial d’una llengua i un pa
ıs mil•lenaris; fa prendre consciencia d’allo que tenim i permet valorar-ho en la justa mesura; i ens encoratja a encarar el futur per mantenir-hi una posici
o preeminent al costat de les altres lleng€ ues i cultures. The word, turned into art, and the landscape join in a symbiosis that represents an affidavit of a language and a thousand-year-old country; it raises awareness of what we have and allows us to value it in its fair measure; and it encourages us © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 550 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE to face the future to maintain a pre-eminent position beside other languages and cultures. (www.endrets.cat, accessed October 29, 2010; our translation) Finally, in the context of Switzerland, Swiss multilingualism and regional and local language varieties are emerging as a distinctive promotional argument in the tourism sector. In its 2010 annual report, the NTB lays the foundation of the central arguments for Helvetic tourism, stating the strengths which allow Switzerland to compete in a highly competitive global industrial landscape: Extract 25 [. . .] un pays s^ ur de lui et tourn
e vers l’avenir, conscient de son histoire et de ses racines et qui r
eunit quatre cultures et quatre langues sur un petit territoire [. . .] [c]’est en cela aussi que la Suisse [. . .] se diff
erencie grandement de la concurrence. (p. 8) [. . .] a country sure of itself and turned towards the future, aware of its history and roots and which gathers four cultures and four languages within a small territory [. . .] this is also why Switzerland [. . .] differs greatly from the competition. (p. 8, our translation) Thus, the image of Switzerland, and the marketing strategy of the tourism industry, is not only directed towards its landscapes, its quality of life, its vibrant cities or infrastructures, it is also directed towards its linguistic specificities, which should arguably strengthen Switzerland’s position in a competitive market. Linguistic diversity contributes fully to the branding of the product, i.e. the construction of distinctions that emphasize the unique, the particular and the authentic (and hence necessarily different) in a place, a territory, an attraction (see Piller 2010 for a description of how this logic is applied to sex workers). This discourse is also reflected in local promotional practices, in which linguistic diversity is seen as an integral component of the product and the tourism experience, as witnessed by texts promoting tourism in the bi/ multilingual regions of Fribourg, the Grisons, or Valais, or, as in the extracts below, the cities of Biel/Bienne and Fribourg. Extract 3 The town of Biel, the metropolis of Swiss watchmaking, lies at the eastern end of Lake Biel, at the foot of the Jura in the delightful Lake Region. The charm of bilingualism, the intact old town and its location as the gateway to the three peripheral Jura lakes (Lakes Biel, Neuch^atel and Murten) make the town an attractive starting point, but also a destination for excursions. (www. myswitzerland.com site, accessed June 1, 2012) Extract 4 Drinking a cup of coffee in a leisurely fashion, admiring the old facades and beautiful fountains, listening to two local languages or gazing from the © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 551 74-meter spire of the Cathedral far into the countryside – this is an experience enjoyed in Fribourg [Freiburg]. (www.myswitzerland.com site, accessed June 1, 2012) In all these cases, we see a convergence. The peripheral economy which allows for the production and reproduction of ‘authentic’ national or quasinational identities dissolves under conditions of late capitalism. It then brings the products of the modern nationalism developed in earlier capitalism (symbols of authentic identity, whether linguistic, literary, or other) into a new globalized and tertiarized market, which treats them as commodities, and they do so often with profiles of consumers that they had not anticipated. This shift is not without tensions, as we will explore below. 4. TENSIONS OVER LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN LATE CAPITALIST TOURISM We see linguistic commodification across our sites in a variety of practices (public signs, marketing, customer service, artistic performances) undertaken by a variety of social actors (the State, tourism providers, employees, artists, and tourists). In these contexts, languages and identities are mobilized to develop a number of commodified linguistic and cultural products that must go through the conventional processes of product development, branding, marketing, distribution and consumption. Thus, symbolic capital developed through modern nationalist inventions of traditions, cultural practices, canons (even vernacular ones), languages and identities is mobilized as marketable. However, what we wish to highlight is that these new practices also trigger new struggles over the sources of authenticating value and legitimacy for the products, the participants, and even the languages and communities concerned, for three reasons. The first is that the products are accorded functions different from their original ones. The second is that language constitutes a work practice in tourism worksites in its own right, and needs to be understood in those terms: language is both a means of attributing authenticating value to the tourist product as well as a means of selling it. This raises the question of whether the selling process is also to be framed as a performance of authenticity. Finally, these processes cannot be abstracted away from the conditions of the market that constrain the production and consumption process, and which the stakeholders (in the widest sense) must take into account at all levels. The tourist market is a highly competitive, constantly changing environment, subject to variations in consumer trends and business models, which requires a flexibility not always suited to the agendas of identity politics. We shall exemplify below how these three sources of tension (over the symbols, the interaction processes and the markets) transpire in different ways in the sites we have researched. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 552 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE The tensions emerge basically as objects and social practices are evaluated from different standpoints, or combine competing sources of value: basically those typical of economic or commercial activity on the one hand, and the lens of linguistic nationalism on the other. The three different dimensions in which these tensions take place are of course interconnected; but for our purposes it is helpful to consider each as distinct facets of the same process. • • • The first typically applies to language when (re)presented as an authentic product. In this dimension, representations draw upon established logics of nationalism linking language, culture, identity, nation and nature or territory so that language can be presented as a commodified artefact along with other cultural artefacts (see Figure 2, below). The second dimension affects language as a mode of industry management, that is, as the set of communicative materialities – the texts and interactions – that constitute and link products, producers and consumers. It points to language use as a process that can also be subjected to commodification. The third dimension concerns the varied markets in which products, producers and consumers are situated, and across which both they and Figure 2: An Acadian souvenir shop in Caraquet, New Brunswick © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 553 their commodified services and products must circulate and are exchanged. These three dimensions are often in tension, not only with each other, but also with older underlying logics of nationalism, which is not a clearly unified ideology in itself. They are experienced as contradictions by actors in the field who seek to reproduce nationalist ideologies and engage in the commodification of language and identity at the same time. They take several forms. The first is the tension between soul and commodity in the development of the value of products. As we indicated above, cultural or heritage tourism products have value derived from their ability to index national authenticities, but on a market which must attribute monetized exchange value to something earlier understood as ineffable. What does it mean to sell what subjects perceive is the national (or regional) soul? The second tension emerges in the domain of process: how best to sell the product? Are the best sellers those who can stake a claim to legitimate incarnation of authenticity, or those who best work within market processes attuned to either taylorist or post-taylorist (Cameron 2000) criteria of efficiency developed for the business sector? Is service in this domain (and its linguistic materialities) best understood as an extension of the authenticity value of the product or as a purely technical skill comparable to the ways people understand the skills of call-centre or fast-food shop service workers? Finally, we have a third problem: who are the consumers and what ‘counts’ for them? Will members of the national or quasi-national group who produce a tourism product also supply its consumers? Will the product have the same value for others as it has for them? Can the same product be marketed in the same way across rapidly changing and highly competitive consumption conditions? Taken together, these three problems or tensions have to be examined against the uneven distribution of available resources, producers and consumers, their different characteristics and the other different conditions of the markets involved. We will illustrate the interplay amongst these tensions as we saw them emerge (differently) in our three field sites. Our first example is drawn from a village in central Ontario, which we will call Lelac. This example shows some of the difficulties faced by militants of political linguistic minority movements in shifting their frame and their practice from lobbying for political rights to harnessing identity with the aim of developing an economically viable tourism product (in this case, a festival), and therefore from addressing co-citizens to addressing consumers. Lelac is reasonably typical of the traditional peripheral bastions of francophone Canada, settled by French Canadians in the mid-19th century, and dependent on a combination of agriculture and lumber, supplemented perhaps by some fishing and hunting, or domestic service, and later, light industry, construction and other trades (see Heller 2011). Developed already in the 19th century as a bulwark of the francophone Catholic nation in a heavily anglophone area, the local population was readily © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 554 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE drawn into the nationalist movement unleashed by the emerging elites of Quebec in the 1960s, developing its own political consciousness, and its own nationalist institutional infrastructure. This infrastructure was sustained by the Canadian State until the late 1990s, and the shift to neoliberal governance and a new emphasis on economic development. As elsewhere, the local elite responded by trying to transform cultural activities initially conceptualized as a means to maintain local ethnonational pride into activities that were designed to act as motors for tourism development, building on earlier ‘cottage’ tourism in an effort to extend it to attracting visitors interested in shorter, more experience-intensive stays. They fixed on the idea of a living museum (capitalizing on the availability of houses vacated by aging villagers) and an annual summer festival. During the course of planning the festival, the issue of the public came up, causing a long discussion in which most of the tensions we described above emerged. The issue was triggered by a concern voiced by a local English-speaking municipal official, one of the members of the larger political authority whose permission was necessary for the festival to take place. The previous year, some people had complained that all the signage was in French, and so she suggested to one of the organizers that perhaps this coming year the signage should be bilingual. This request came as something of a shock to the committee. Up until now it had been self-evident that the event would take place in French only, as had always been assumed within the framework of modernist nationalism within which they had hitherto operated. In the following extract, we see the organizing committee debating the consequences of this request. They grappled with the fact that a festival as a tourist product was not the same as a festival as a cultural and linguistic maintenance event: the second was aimed solely at an internal public, and should be only in French, while the first measured its success in terms of the numbers of tickets sold, and so could not legitimately exclude anyone who paid for a ticket, nor could it financially afford to (the local francophone population did not have the numbers in and of itself to guarantee financial stability, even if everyone bought a ticket, which they didn’t). Extract 5: Festival organizing committee meeting, June 9, 2003 Nina: Sylvie: Les affiches sur le site / tu voulais en parler Ahh oui excuse sur le site je pensais que tu parlais du site web //uhmm je parlais la semaine pass
e avec Mary Caron de la chambre de commerce pis uhm pour qu’ils prennent des (x) cards pis elle m’a demand
e un couple de petites questions sur le festival / pis elle me demandait si notre intention
etait d’avoir pas seulement des francophones mais aussi la communaut
e anglophone © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM Nina: [ ... ] Nina: Mario: [ ... ] ?: Nina: [ ... ] Nina: Sylvie: [ ... ] Sylvie: Mario: Sylvie: [. . .] Ren
e: [ ... ] Mario: Nina: Nina: Sylvie: 555 On veut rien que les francophones et les chinois a l’exclusion de quiconque (x) Mais a quelque part les gens viennent pour un peu d’immersion dans la culture pis la langue pis Oui si ils posent une question en anglais on n’est pas pour dire ‘On parle pas l’anglais’ ( rires ) (x) Est-ce que les ateliers vont ^etre bilingues? Non
ecoute o u est-ce qu’on met la ligne la Ben il me semble que ßc a va faire partie du savoir faire de chacune des personnes qui r
epondent aux demandes des renseignements c’est tout / c’est c’est c’est qu’on ait du tacte pis un peu de politesse pis on va utiliser toute les signes de courtoisie qui est la dans le service a la clientele r
egulier qu’on offre dans toutes les entreprises peu importe si client veut nous parler en Swahili / bon on lui dira parle anglais parce qu’on est sure qu’il parle pas francßais t’sais pis on va ^etre capable de lui r
epondre / c’est juste du savoir vivre ßc a Non parce que je pense que c’est juste pour les annonces parce que c’est ßc a qu’elle m’a demand
e / c’est quoi c’est qui votre audience c’est qui que vous voulez soit la Non je lui ai dit que ben c’est s^ ur les francophones mais aussi je lui ai dit aussi qu’on veut montrer a la communaut
e anglophone la tradition francophone Pis qu’on existe Ouais Pis c’est difficile pis c’est pas l’ironie la c’est difficile de faire passer de la culture francophone en anglais t’sais / comme je sais que les gens leur ai dit ben si vous parlez en anglais vous parlez en anglais / votre produit que ßc a soit une barre de savon ou que ßc a soit et la c’est tout / si les gens veulent parler en anglais ils parlent en anglais Pis de toute facßon on le promouvait comme venez voir c’est quoi la culture francophone Ben je pense que ßc a peut faire partie d’un communiqu
e de presse la t’sais on peut l’int
egrer comme uhhm un peu d’ouverture d’esprit] The signs on the site / you wanted to talk about them Ahh yes sorry on the site I thought you were talking about the Web site // uhmmmm I was talking last week with Mary Caron from the chamber of commerce and and uhm so that they take some (x) cards and she asked a couple of little questions about the festival / and she asked me if our intention was to have not only francophones but also the anglophone community © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 556 Nina: [ ... ] Nina: Mario: [ ... ] ?: Nina: [ ... ] Nina: Sylvie: [ ... ] Sylvie: Mario: Sylvie: [ ... ] Rene: [ ... ] Mario: Nina: ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE We want only francophones and Chinese to the exclusion of any other party (x) But somewhere people come for a bit of immersion in the culture and the language and Yes if they ask a question in English we aren’t going to say ‘We don’t speak English’ ( laughter ) (x) Are the workshops going to be bilingual? No listen where are we going to draw the line there Well it seems to me that that will be part of the interpersonal skills of each person who responds to requests for information that’s all / that’s that’s that’s that we should have tact and a little politeness and we will use all the signs of courtesy which are included in regular customer service that are offered in all companies no matter whether a customer wants to speak to us in Swahili / well we’ll tell him ‘Speak English’ because we are sure he doesn’t speak French you know and we will be able to answer him / that’s just life skills No because I think it’s just for the announcements because that’s what she asked me / what is who is your audience who do you want to be there No I told her that well of course the francophones / but also I told her also that we want to show francophone tradition to the anglophone community And that we exist Yeah And it’s difficult and this is not being ironic it’s difficult to get francophone culture across in English you know / like I know people they asked me too for the kiosks it’s the same thing / I told them well if you speak in English you speak in English / your product whether it’s a bar of soap or a and that’s all / if people want to speak in English they speak in English And anyway we promote it like come see what francophone culture is Well I think it could be part of a press release you know we can include it like uhm a little open-mindedness So how to decide whether to accede to the official’s request? As we can see, the thought of including English on signage is disturbing; within the old framework, it means bending to the oppression of the majority again. The festival should be in French because it is about pride, and about recognition (‘we want to show francophone tradition to the anglophone community’; ‘and that we exist’). It is also, however, about attracting customers, albeit with a product whose value is authentic identity, indexed, again, by exclusive use of French (‘people come for a bit of immersion in the culture and the language’). © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 557 Both ways point to the use of French. But if you want to be recognized, and if you want customers to understand what they are consuming, you have to make some concessions, and so perhaps, in the end, as long as the core of the product (the artistic performances) remains French (‘Are the workshops going to be bilingual?’ ‘No listen where are we going to draw the line there’), bilingual signage on the grounds could be permitted. As Nina says, this way the committee also retains the moral high ground, showing that they are polite to their guests (who apparently are not able to figure out what toilettes means). We saw similar concessions in the account we gave above regarding the increasing use of English at ‘Le Pays de la Sagouine’, and witnessed similar shifts at other sites, where, for example, after a few years a spectacle might be introduced briefly in English with a welcome to spectators who do not speak French, and who are encouraged to enjoy the lights, the sound, the action, the music and dancing, even if they don’t understand the words. The Catalan literary museums we researched also illustrate some of the tensions involved in turning heritage into a tourism product, as well as those related to the management of selling that product and identifying the market, as manifested again on the terrain of translation. Museum officials were aware of the need to attract not just local but also international visitors, so they began to provide some multilingual material (in Catalan, Spanish, French and English) in the exhibits: signs and explanations attached to exhibited mementos could easily be designed in a way that kept the Catalan language as the most visible option. One of the websites currently offers versions in six languages in addition to Catalan. These include Galician and Basque, a gesture that actually points more to the symbolic than the practical significance of making languages visible: a multilingualism that responds not just to market demands but also to political solidarities with regions of Spain that also have a minority language. However, with multimedia material, including online resources, multilingualism required a level of investment that was beyond the means or the immediate priorities of the museums. With scarce resources available, should they be invested in attracting foreign visitors or in the conventional educational and cultural activities addressed to their usual constituencies? So there were no subtitles or alternative voices for videos, or updated information on the website in the languages other than Catalan. Moreover, there was the problem of translating the literary texts used both in the exhibit and in the literary trails offered to visitors. As shown above, the Catalan language was considered an essential component of a product that provided the intellectual substance of the text and the sensory experience of the landscape. Thus, when non-Catalan visitors came (always Spaniards, often retirees), officials and tour guides adopted their less preferred option of conducting the tours in Spanish. However, they decided not to adapt to Spanish-speakers from Catalan-speaking areas and trust that their listening skills would suffice. In the two sites we © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 558 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE examined more closely, officials claimed that they also recruited people of local origin as tour guides to ensure that the flavour provided by the local accent provided a more authentic experience. Both the performance and, to an extent, the performers were seen as part of the authentic product. However, in terms of positioning the product for an international tourist audience, this aspect was of little relevance. Our third example, from our third ethnographic site, concerns also the third dimension of this problem, that is, the question of markets and how to address them. In this case, we see that national consumer markets are assumed to have different worldviews, and therefore distinct consumer expectations, corresponding to distinct varieties of the same language. For many years customer service was offered on-site by the Swiss regional offices (for domestic customers) and representative offices abroad. In the late 1990s, NTB reduced costs by centralizing services at one call centre and sharing the cost of service provision with other agencies and institutions (Swiss railways, airlines, a hotel chain). This call centre became responsible for both the national market and for specific European markets (Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Belgium). The mission of the call centre is threefold. First, it must embody a Swiss tourist product through a transactional service relationship. Consistency between the product to be sold and the person who promotes it is then central. In this specific context, particular attention is paid to language and local varieties, spoken by the employees of the call centres. Second, services must adapt to the needs of consumers. This adaptation consists primarily in providing services in the languages of the target consumers. Employees are also informed of the typical characteristics of the markets and learn how to behave accordingly. Third, these services must be cost effective, requiring careful management of activities, cost control and high productivity. However, speaking the language of the clients (say selling Switzerland to a Spaniard in Castilian Spanish) makes it difficult to perform Swiss authenticity. At the same time, having to multiply languages by markets is costly; the call centre cannot afford to have a ‘native speaker’ dedicated to each specific national market, since this would risk paying employees who might end up under-occupied (if say, on any given day few calls in Spanish came in, and the workers were not sufficiently flexible to perform other tasks). The call centre tried to address these tensions through recruitment policies and practices. First, it sought employees who were ‘native speakers’ of other languages, but with a Swiss background, notably from among migrants; they were considered more likely to perform and inflect the product in an ‘authentic’ manner, both in terms of the knowledge they had of Switzerland and in terms of their accent. In these voices, the call centre sought to balance both the authenticity of Switzerland and the voice of the consumers’ world. Second, the call centre only hired employees who had mastered several languages, in order to allow for an effective and efficient labour process: it was © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 559 more productive to have multilingual employees who were able to respond to calls from different markets. Employees, therefore, had to incarnate and perform multiple voices (as of course has been well-documented for call centres of many types all over the world (Cameron 2000; Roy 2003; Duch^ene 2009). While NTB was able to find ways to resolve at least some of the issues engendered by the tensions between perceived authenticity and commodification, others were more difficult. In particular, the call centre found it difficult to manage the different and often rapidly evolving consumer markets that required both the diversification and the flexibility involved in selling eminently different types of niche products from ‘authentic’ local traditions through mountain sports up to gay tourism (the first, by the way, often encoded through traditional imaginaries of peasant masculinity). Additionally, there are differences among national markets in terms of the value they accord to authenticity. Most NTB informants mentioned that the Swiss German dialect was a major asset in selling to the German market (Germans being typically fond of Swiss German or the French Swiss accent). For Canadians, however, while Swiss linguistic diversity is a central selling proposition, it has to be explained clearly that the diversity found in Switzerland will not be exactly the same as the one in Canada. Further, Quebecois need to hear that French is a Swiss national language, while Canadian anglophones want to be reassured that Swiss people have good command of English. According to the Swiss representative in Spain, the idea of linguistic diversity should be erased from the marketing discourse used there; it constitutes an obstacle. Spaniards are (reportedly) stereotypically understood to be incompetent with foreign languages and not interested in such things. If national markets are still important marketing units that structure the tourism industry in Switzerland, the national categories are complexified by the existence of other axes of differentiation, like being a ‘senior’ or being ‘gay’. Those categories complicate linguistic commodification and accentuate its variable component. A Swiss tourism provider specialized in the German and Austrian markets insists on the fact that young people and LGBT6 tourists might consider the dialect as being too connected to rurality, not sufficiently cosmopolitan and, as such, not an appealing element of the tourism experience. Another tourism provider specialized in the Southern European market explained to us that Spanish elites don’t want necessarily to be addressed in Spanish by an immigrant, and might prefer an English-speaking guide, or a Spanish-speaking guide with a foreign accent. The final component of the fluctuation concerns the fact that consumers’ interests and the ways the market is structured can change very quickly. As a tour company manager states: ‘You know, a couple of years ago Poland was a big thing, we thought that it will be a new market, but in fact the Polish they came but really didn’t come back’. He continues by saying: ‘we need to constantly adapt and we never know what the future will be’. Both the tourism © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 560 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE provider and the company manager are pointing to the rapidly changing nature of the markets and of consumers’ interests. The problem of positioning an ethnonational product for a diverse (inter) national market is also illustrated by examining how Catalan literary houses featured within the local tourist industry. These were largely ignored by both the private and public agents in the tourism sector. They received no funding from the department of tourism and were virtually untraceable from the official Catalan tourism website, where, if one clicked the ‘cultural’ tab,7 one found a ‘Catalonia is culture’ guide featuring ‘Literature’ as a theme on page 33, which prioritised writers from Barcelona who published in Spanish. A mention and a link to the Espais Escrits website was all one could find. And this happened after years of distinctly nationalist tourist policies that insisted on the value of Catalan cultural heritage in tourism as a strategic asset. Museum officials also complained that the owners of hotels and restaurants did not make any effort to recommend their sites to visitors. So, while members of the network were convinced that they had to play the card of the tourist market, the central actors in this market were actually uninterested. Those who run ‘Le Pays de La Sagouine’ and the Catalan literary sites were well aware that contemporary markets require the constant renewal of the products. So the former kept renewing its artistic shows each year, and the latter proposed new thematic temporal exhibits and events that could be used to attract press coverage and produce new marketing initiatives. The Fundaci
o Josep Pla, situated very close to the Costa Brava, made efforts to attract the interest of international visitors with temporary exhibits such as Pels camins de l’Emporda. G€ unter Grass – Josep Pla ‘the pathways through the Empord a district’ (our translation), an exhibit featuring landscape drawings by the German writer presented against texts of the Catalan writer. It was a meritorious attempt to circumvent linguistic barriers, and indeed a few German tourists appear to have turned up at the exhibit, albeit not in large numbers. Site officials in all these contexts confessed that their ability to attract visitors from constituencies other than their traditional ones were largely unsuccessful. The two literary houses researched had experienced enormous success and attracted thousands of Catalan visitors in specific years when commemorations were celebrated, such as centennials. In normal years, however, their average turnout was around 5000 visitors, difficult to compare with the hundreds of thousands of hotel beds on offer in neighbouring towns. The different tensions described here reveal the complexity of linguistic commodification. Linguistic commodification is not a given; it can be easily destabilized. The tourism providers’ discourses also point to the central challenges the industry is facing. In a global marketplace, territorially-bound monolingual ideologies sit uncomfortably in an eminently multilingual industry. Moreover, the industry must have workers who can perform the authenticity that is connected to the product, but who can also speak © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 561 the languages of the clients. Given the heterogeneous nature of the market and the difficulty of predicting how it will evolve, even in the relatively short term, the industry needs a flexible, multi-tasking and linguistically diversified workforce that can be easily managed. Finally, the success of identity tourism initiatives harnessing linguistic nationalism can no longer be measured by the degree of community political support and hegemony they can muster, but by their ability to carve for themselves a position in a diversified market that undergoes constant transformations and requires continuous renewal. 5. CONCLUSION: LANGUAGE IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS Tourism in sociolinguistic peripheries, and the role in it of linguistic commodification in particular, shows some of the ways in which peripheral communities opt to rethink themselves under current political and economic conditions. The processes of commodification we have described involve new ways of using and representing languages and language practices in the specific field of tourism in different contexts. As such, they also involve ways of constructing linguistic capital that create new conditions for their convertibility as symbolic and economic capital, all within the context of economic and political transformations from national to global logics that reconfigure the ways in which social hierarchies are produced and reproduced. Globalization affects not only the control of nation-States over their territory, but also the availability of the territory to signify the nation as economic activities, bodies and cultural practices become increasingly deterritorialized (Appadurai 1996). One reaction on the part of nation-States has been to treat territories of all kinds (but especially those most negatively affected by globalization, such as internal peripheries) as subjects of policies of d
eveloppement
economique ‘economic development’ or dinamitzaci
o territorial ‘territorial dynamization’ (terms being used synonymously in Canada and Catalonia to name policies aimed at encouraging new economic activities in rural areas). In this context, territories are turned into commodities and made into ‘landscapes’ or sites of ‘memory’, i.e. marketable objects for mobile consumers. As Bauman observes, ‘a bizarre adventure happened to space on the road to globalization: it lost its importance while gaining in significance’ (Bauman 2000: 110). In this context, peripheral communities reassess their own resources and explore ways in which they can tap into the market for experiences, lifestyles and culture. Within a conventional neoliberal frame, peripheral language groups must learn to market themselves, identify the resources that can be commodified, and turn their rhetoric of political mobilization to one of marketable entertainment in complex and ambivalent ways. Thus, the sociolinguistics of tourism provides a window into understanding the emergence of new linguistically-invested forms of power which follow a logic of circulations and mobilities, and are in stark contrast with the cultural © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 562 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE expressions of industrial capitalism, with its emphasis on territoriality and ethnonational belonging. The commodification of language and identity is then something fully consistent with the economic and cultural processes triggered by the globalized new economy. The increasingly contested hegemony of the language-identity-culture ideology, with its investments in territorial nation-States and bounded monolingual spaces, and its foundations in the industrial economies, provides the backdrop against which such changes are taking place. The discourses and practices of linguistic commodification draw upon these established principles, dispositions and distinctions. They all hark back to language as an emblem of identity, as associated to specific ethnic groups, cultural traditions and the territories that must offer a differentiated product. However, behind the typical happy-go-lucky, conflict-free, cosmopolitan cultural communion offered in tourist brochures and advertising, we find the disruptions and displacements (notably around conflicting ideas about the nature of the product, of the audience, and therefore of management) created by the need to renegotiate what counts as linguistic and cultural capital and who gets to decide their legitimacy in a constantly changing economic environment. Thus, the notion of language as a bounded code where an invariable standard rose as a means for differentiation between the national community and the other national linguistic communities is challenged in a global context where all cultural forms are ‘local’ and cultural practices at least potentially ‘hybrid’. Particularly in tourist contexts, specific tensions arise, given that the national ‘we’ must be constructed for the benefit of the global ‘other’. This tension fails to emerge only when the product is targeted to a market that can be constructed as composed of interchangeable producers and consumers, as in the initial attempts to make a market for Lelac’s festival, or in rural tourism for Catalans, but usually those consumers are not numerous enough to support the financial endeavour. Even under those circumstances, the potential for variably circulating local forms, earlier thought of as ‘vernacular’, and standard ones, under these conditions, facilitates re-thinking language as a set of resources which circulate (albeit unevenly) around networks of speakers cast as producers and consumers, and which are available to them in their work of production and consumption (as opposed to bounded codes to be mastered). More importantly, as a market, there is no basis for legitimately excluding consumers, and so strategies must be devised so that the emblematic display of local language does not drive the customers out. In the ‘Pays de la Sagouine’, for example, this was solved first by providing English-speaking days, and later English-speaking guides, although the management was in 2009 still worried about its lack of success beyond Francophone tourism. The Catalan focus on literary texts generally restricts the audience to region. And in Switzerland, the marketing of multilingualism is carefully accompanied by the construction of the place as an English-speaking country, sometimes with the disappearance of © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 563 the ‘bilingual’ experience when targeting specific markets (Jaworski and Piller 2008; Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; Duch^ene 2012). The second ideological disruption affects the processes whereby specific actors are positioned within struggles over language and access to resources. Research in call centres (Roy 2003; Dubois, LeBlanc and Beaudin 2006; Duch^ene 2009), or in specific services to globalized customers (Duch^ene 2011), has already shown how the new communicative economy creates tensions in the corporate sector as to how multilingualism is economically valued. In tourist contexts, struggles get more often directed towards deciding who embodies the local community, now seen as a destination: are only minority speakers allowed to set up businesses, serve customers, develop and sell specific products? What about movable workers and entrepreneurs? How are such inclusions and exclusions decided and by whom? Tourism presents itself as a means to navigate the new economy in ways which allow for the commodification of culture, identity and language, on the one hand, and the exploitation of multilingual communication skills, on the other. Exactly how this happens is different from one case to another, depending for example, on the nature and degree of economic crisis, access to resources of interested actors, the extent of existing tourism infrastructure or specific local sociohistorical conditions. What they have in common is the fact that this new field of practice produces specific configurations of the interrelation between the symbolic and the economic, between what we have expressed elsewhere as ‘pride and profit’ (Duch^ene and Heller 2011). What we call the classical nation-State paradigm of modernity was characterized by specific socio-economic hierarchies and representations of linguistic practices and resources that drew on the political economy of industrial and ‘print capitalism’ (Anderson 1991). Late modernity erodes the boundaries of nation-States and their economic bases. Old discourses about language and identity are drawn upon and recontextualized in fields such as tourism and heritage that are no longer contained and containable within the logic of bounded languages and communities. This has complex implications for the ways in which linguistic practices are produced, regulated and marshalled to negotiate symbolic and economic power: it challenges the supremacy of standards in the face of internal variation and hybridity. And this in turn has consequences for the possibilities and positions that individuals and groups can develop in the new linguistic markets. This is why we see tourism as one of the key sites for a sociolinguistic study of the political economy of globalization. NOTES 1. In this case, the product has a ‘public’ in terms of the local constituency to which its development is presented as both an economic policy and a form of © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE 564 2. 3. 4. 5. projecting identity, and a ‘market’ for those called upon to consume it. Publics and consumers may or may not coincide to different extents. Our research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Spanish Ministerio de Educaci on y Ciencia (Ref. HUM2006-13621-C04-04/ FILO). We also thank the many members of our teams, especially Kathryn Jones, Mireille McLaughlin, Hubert No€el, Mary Richards, Emanuel da Silva, Maia Yarymowich, Natalie Zur Nedden, Alfonso Del Percio, Arthur Zinn-Poget, Mi-Cha Flubacher, Ingrid Piller and Katia Sommerhalder. Literary trails, literary atlases mark on maps places which feature as important symbolic sites, either because they identify where key literary works in the national canon were produced, where authors were born, died or resided, or which play a key role in the content of important works. We recognize that we have a tendency to think of peripheries as dependent and relatively poor compared to centres; we argue that Switzerland’s dependency on managing resources produced elsewhere allows us to see it as a periphery, as well as challenging us to understand peripheries somewhat differently than we usually do. Indeed, it seems to us that peripheries are precisely able to profit from their border position, today more so than in the recent past as transnational movements increase in importance. Transcription conventions: / a short pause // a pause (x) inaudible utterance ? unidentified speaker [. . .] section excerpted 6. ‘LGBT’ refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. 7. http://www.turismedecatalunya.com/cultura/index.asp REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Zigmund. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press. Cameron, Deborah. 2000. Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 323–347. Dubois, Lise, Melanie LeBlanc and Maurice Beaudin. 2006. La langue comme ressource productive et les rapports de pouvoir entre communautes linguistiques. Langage et soci
et
e 118: 17–42. Duch^ene, Alexandre. 2009. Marketing, management and performance: Multilingualism as commodity in a tourism call centre. Language Policy 8: 27–50. Duch^ene, Alexandre. 2011. Neoliberalisme, inegalites sociales et plurilinguisme: l’exploitation des ressources langagieres et des locuteurs. Langage et soci
et
e 136: 81–106. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd LINGUISTIC COMMODIFICATION IN TOURISM 565 Duch^ene, Alexandre. 2012. Des marches, des locuteurs et des langues. Sociolinguistica 26: 120–135. Duch^ene, Alexandre and Monica Heller. 2011. Pride and Profit: Language in Late Capitalism. Oxford, U.K.: Routledge. Ebbatson, Roger and Ann Donahue. 2005. An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920. Farnham, U.K: Ashgate Publishing. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell. Hechter, Michael. 1975. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British Nationalism 1536–1966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Heller, Monica. 2010. The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 101–114. Heller, Monica. 2011. Paths to Postnationalisms: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Henderson, Saras and Alan Petersen. 2001. Consuming Health: The Commodification of Health Care. London: Routledge. Hewison, Robert. 1987. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Jaworski, Adam and Ingrid Piller. 2008. Linguascaping Switzerland: Language ideologies in tourism. In Miriam A. Locher and J€ urg Str€ assler (eds.) Standards and Norms in the English Language. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. 301–321. Jaworski, Adam and Crispin Thurlow. 2010. Language and the globalizing habitus of tourism: Towards a sociolinguistics of fleeting relationships. In Nikolas Coupland (ed.) Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Oxford, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell. 255–286. Kelly-Holmes, Helen and Sari Pietik€ ainen (eds.). 2013. Peripheral Multilingualism: Features, Processes, Concepts, Practices. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Lash, Scott and John Urry. 1994. Economies of Signs and Space. SAGE: London. Loader, Ian. 1999. Consumer culture and the commodification of policing and security. Sociology 33: 373–392. Maillet, Antonine. 1971. La Sagouine. Montreal, Canada: Lemeac. McAfee, Kathleen. 1999. Selling nature to save it? Biodiversity and green developmentalism. Environment and Planning 17: 133–154. Oxford Dictionary of English. 2010. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Parry, Bronwyn. 2004. Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-information. New York: Columbia University Press. Piller, Ingrid. 2010. Sex in the city: On making space and identity in travel spaces. In Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds.) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum International. 123–136. Pitchford, Susan. 2008. Identity Tourism. Imaging and Imagining the Nation. Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Group Publishing Ltd. Rose, Nikolas. 1993. Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism. Economy and Society 22: 283–299. Roy, Sylvie. 2003. Bilingualism and standardization in a Canadian call center: Challenges for a linguistic minority community. In Robert Bayley and Sandra Schecter (eds.) Language Socialization in Multilingual Societies. Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. 269– 287. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 566 ^ HELLER, PUJOLAR AND DUCHENE Silva da, Emanuel and Monica Heller. 2009. From protector to producer: The role of the state in the discursive shift from minority rights to economic development. Language Policy 8: 95–116. Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2008. Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist 35: 211–228. Williams, Raymond. 1975. The Country and the City. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. Address correspondence to: Monica Heller Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto 252 Bloor Street W. Toronto Ontario M5S 1V6 Canada monica.heller@utoronto.ca © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd