Gloria Cappelli Travelling words: Languaging in English tourism discourse 1. Introduction This article analyses instances of the use of languaging in a small corpus of English tourism materials about Italy. The use of languaging is investigated in three written genres, namely guidebooks, expatriates’ travel blogs and travel articles or travelogues. The main goal of this study is to evidence once more the fundamental role of language in tourism 1 and to present cases of Italian-English language crossing in tourism discourse and their functions. The Italian expressions retrieved from the corpus are first classified according to the main topic areas to which they belong and then according to the discursive environment in which they occur in the three genres (i.e., expert talk, phatic communication, naming and translating 2 ). Then, the question of whether the individual examples can be considered as cases of language crossing 3 or real code-mixing (e.g., instances of insertion or congruent lexicalization 4 ) is addressed. The differences in the use of languaging in the three genres at issue are finally discussed in order to show how this technique is intended to produce various pragmatic effects, which are fundamental in the specialized type of discourse represented by the language of tourism 5 . 2. What is languaging? In the linguistic and sociolinguistic literature languaging has received different definitions. Cortese and Hymes 6 essentially see languaging as the way in which individuals ‘give voice’ to their own identity in a specific social context and as the ‘rooting of the psychological and moral individual in the local social dimension’. 7 Following Hymes 8 and Bourdieu, 9 languaging is associated with ‘“positioning” oneself within the repertory of customary practices of a local culture’ and with acquiring a ‘linguistic sense of place’. 10 The authors also define languaging as ‘language rooted in memory’ 11 and underline how ‘evoked memory and affect are powerfully involved’ in it. 12 In this article, however, languaging is used in a sense akin to that found in Boyer and Viallon, 13 who define it as the use of foreign words to provide local colour or to flatter the pseudo-linguistic abilities of the reader. This study is also significantly indebted to Dann’s use of the term. 14 The latter author builds on Potter’s analysis of the phenomenon 15 (i.e., ‘a form of scoring over one’s rivals through the use of real or fictitious foreign words of which they have scant knowledge, thereby inducing feelings of inferiority in one’s opponent’ 16 ). Dann sees languaging in tourism discourse as ‘the impressive use of foreign words, but also a manipulation of the vernacular, a special choice of vocabulary, and not just for its own sake’ 17 and as ‘the use of particular 1 Graham Dann, The Language of Tourism. A Sociolinguistic Perspective (Wallingford: Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International, 1996). 2 Adam Jaworski, Crispin Thurlow, Sarah Lawson, and Virpi Ylänne-McEwen, ‘The Uses and Representations of Local Languages in Tourist Destinations: A View from British TV Holiday Programmes’, Language Awareness 12:1 (2003), 5-29. 3 Ben Rampton, Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents (London: Longman, 1995); Ben Rampton, ‘Language crossing and the redefinition of reality’ in Peter Auer (ed.), Codeswitching in Conversation (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 290-317. 4 Pieter Muysken, Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5 Gloria Cappelli, Sun, Sea, Sex and the Unspoilt Countryside. How the English language makes tourists out of readers (Pari: Pari Publishing, 2006); Maurizio Gotti, ‘The language of tourism as specialized discourse’, in Oriana Palusci and Sabrina Francesconi (eds), Translating Tourism. Linguistic/cultural Representations (Trento: Editrice Università degli Studi di Trento, 2006), pp. 15-34; Maria Giovanna Nigro, Il linguaggio specialistico del turismo (Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2006). 6 Giuseppina Cortese and Dell Hymes, Languaging in and across Human Groups. Perspectives on Difference and Asymmetry, Textus. English Studies in Italy 14:2 (Genoa: Tilgher, 2001). 7 Cortese and Hymes, p. 199. 8 Dell Hymes, Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996). 9 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 10 Cortese and Hymes, p. 194. 11 Cortese and Hymes, p. 199. 12 Cortese and Hymes , p. 200. 13 Marc Boyer and Philippe Viallon, La communication touristique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), p. 46. 14 Dann, The Language of Tourism. 15 Stephen Potter, The Complete Upmanship (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970). 16 Dann, pp. 90-91. 17 Dann, p. 184.