Discourse, Tourism and Globalisation

Tianjin global tourism and multilingual construction of local interests :  A strategic interactional study

Funded by Tianjin Social Sciences Grant 
Principal investigator: Hailong Tian

Tianjin, a 700-year cultural city in the northern part of China, is rich in its historical heritages, natural resorts, and local interests. To assist in its developing global tourism, this research project is conducted to investigate how foreign languages (mostly English, but also Japanese and French) can play a role in promoting and marketing the local cultural resorts. The project is carried out in tow phases: 1) to survey the status quo of employing foreign languages in destinations, and the degree to which foreign languages are employed, 2) to focus on the multilingual discursive construction of the destinations by developing linguistic strategies. The aim of the project is to provide theoretical principles as well as practical guidelines for the promotion of the local global tourism.

The theories the study draws on are mostly (though not exclusively) from discourse studies. According to Foucault (1972), the object of knowledge is discursively constructed. Fairclough (2003) also highlights that the reality in social life is constructed by discourse. In this sense, the historical heritages and local interests can only become meaningful to the foreign tourists by a kind of language that they are familiar with both in terms of forms and culture. The popularity of these local interests is then to a great extent created by the language employed to describe them. Starting from this point, the study examines how linguistic strategies can be used for this discursive construction.

Destinations where foreign languages use is surveyed include:

The ten natural resorts in Tianjin

Historical heritages

Elites' places

Five-star hotels

Other local interests

Topics to be discussed include:

Cultural awareness of hosts and tourists

Multilingual construction of local interests and the tourism marketing

Linguistic strategies in multilingual construction

Global tourism and local multilingualism

Strategic development of global tourism in Tianjin