Distant countries brought h ome: Linguascaping the exotic in British TV and newspaper travelogues

Adam Jaworski (Cardiff University)

British TV holiday programmes (most notably BBC's Holiday and ITV's Wish You Were Here...? ), as well as the newspaper travel sections (e.g. in The Guardian and The Sunday Times ) are peppered with uses and representations of languages (other than English) local to tourist destinations. Building on the interdisciplinary approach combining frame analysis, language crossing/stylisation, and language ideology, this talk argues that in the context of the British media, the snippets of 'foreign' languages perform a range of symbolic functions such as appropriation and ultimately commodification of local languages; indexing destinations as 'exotic'; positioning the presenters/writers as 'expert' or 'elite'; and, by implication, positioning local people in travel destinations as 'parochial', 'non-elite', and 'othered'.