INEQUALITY, MOBILITY, AND SUPER-DIVERSITY: LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGIES AND PERFORMANCES IN THE PHILIPPINE TOURISM INDUSTRY

Abstract

This study examines the impact of globalization on the linguistic market in the Philippine tourism industry, and how it reconfigures and rearranges structures of inequality and possibilities of mobility. With the primary assumption that language is a site of and a resource for semiotic contestations of social structures, the study analyzes how the various linguistic ideologies and performances of tour guides strategically negotiate their social position in a super-diverse tourism industry.

Using the lens of ethnography, the study identifies various ways of how globalization reconfigures tourist destinations as super-diverse communities. These can be seen in the policies of the national government, the global and local semiotic constructions of tourist destinations as globalized spaces, and the diverse backgrounds and experiences that result in the truncated repertoires of the tour guides. These reconfigurations result in new forms of inequality and mobility.

The tour guides in this study reveal multiple ways of re-scaling and re-appropriating linguistic resources in order to challenge the inequality of the world system. By focusing on the voices of the tour guides, the study argues that their individual attempts at mobility should be viewed as legitimate ways of reconfiguring the polycentric linguistic market in the tourism industry.

The study emphasizes the need to further highlight the role of the individual in the assessment of the different trajectories that the linguistic market may take, and hopes to contribute to the ongoing academic conversations on the sociolinguistics of globalization.