Lang Policy DOI 10.1007/s10993-017-9437-3 ORIGINAL PAPER
Turning local bilingualism into a touristic experience Larissa Semiramis Schedel1
Received: 9 September 2016 / Accepted: 9 March 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract Local languages/varieties play a key role in the construction of an authentic and local tourism experience. This is also the case in the bilingual town of Murten, which uses its situation at the language border between the French- and the German-speaking part of Switzerland and the local bilingualism to attract and entertain tourists in different ways. Taking the example of a theatrical bilingual guided tour, this paper focuses on the linguistic management adopted by the involved touristic institutions in order to package and adjust the local linguistic diversity to turn it into a touristic experience that can be commodified on the tourism market. Keywords Bilingualism Language policy Commodification Performance Tourism Guided tours
Introduction In response to the exchangeability of tourism destinations as a consequence of globalization, an increasing branding of local particularities and the claim for ‘‘authenticity’’ as an added value can be observed (Hamon and Dano 2005). In this framework, language and culture, and particularly linguistic diversity, are often invested as a particularly authentic or exotic resource that tourists can experience. In ethnographic studies on the economic appropriation and consumption of language/multilingualism as a touristic highlight, language is frequently treated as a ‘commodity’ (Ducheˆne and Piller 2011; Heller et al. 2014b; Pietika¨inen and KellyHolmes 2011; Pujolar and Jones 2011). The authors take an anthropological & Larissa Semiramis Schedel
[email protected] 1
Institute of Multilingualism, University of Fribourg, Rue de Morat 24, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland
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approach inspired by Bourdieu (Appadurai 1986; Bourdieu 1982) and define language as a commodity in situations in which language adds value to a consumable good/service that has a specific use value (e.g. when the product gets consumed or when a service is used) and exchange value (e.g. when a product/ service has a certain measurable and comparable price on a specific market) (Ducheˆne and Heller 2012a; Heller and Ducheˆne 2016). The commodification of languages or forms of speech is not limited to linguistically styled or marked services and products, but includes also the commodification of identity in terms of the speaker (Heller 2003). Making language and speakers fit for commodification, particularly in the context of tourism, raises a lot of strategic questions about which languages are perceived as consumable, about who is going to produce the consumable experience and for whom, and about which forms of body and language performance are used to transmit these experiences. The strategies by which a linguistic performance gets selected, packaged, controlled, disciplined and displayed are all framed by a specific language policy. It is this policy, the underlying assumptions of language, and the consequences of this language policy for the speakers—especially in terms of access to, recognition in, and position within a (touristic) job market—that are of interest for this paper. While some destinations merely point to the bi- or multilingualism of the local population within marketing, other destinations try to attract the public’s attention by creating activities that would allow tourists to experience the linguistic particularities of a region. The commodification of multilingualism into a touristic experience is presently occurring in different bilingual regions along the intranational French-German language border in Switzerland. I have noticed the emergence of bilingual tours and touristic events e.g. in a museum in Fribourg, on a wine trail and in a nature park in the canton of Valais, and on St. Peter Island in Lake Biel. Several sociolinguists have also observed a variety of incidents of this commodification within a number of different contexts (Heller et al. 2014b; KellyHolmes and Pietika¨inen 2015; Pujolar and Jones 2011). The bilingual formats or constellations adopted by the observed tours or events in Switzerland vary greatly and often deliver alternative ways of imagining bilingualism. Some tours and events are designed exclusively for people with a good command of both languages and exclude monolingual speakers, while others simultaneously target monolingual speakers of both languages. In the case of guided tours, the guides deliver information either in both languages and translate or split the group into a Germanspeaking one and a French-speaking one. These different models of using language as a touristic highlight have implications for the ways language and bilingualism are locally perceived, valued, and controlled, and therefore also have consequences for the speakers working and living within this context. The bilingual town of Murten is one of these destinations that attempts in different ways to capitalize on local bilingualism. Some of these endeavors are more successful than others. Taking the example of a theatrical bilingual guided tour through Murten, this article aims to question the ways in which bilingualism is institutionally managed, adjusted, and turned into a consumable tourism experience. By analyzing the process of the development of the bilingual theatrical guided tour, this paper will provide a detailed insight into different forms of strategic policies
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(such as specific language choices, the scripting of the linguistic and acting performance, and the regulated and controlled integration of the audience into the performance) that are adopted by the tour operators and by the tour guides in order to anticipate and to respond to the requirements of a linguistically heterogeneous and unpredictable market. Concluding, I will argue that the increasing appropriation of bilingualism challenges existing language hegemonies on-site.
Linguistic commodification in the context of tourism The tourism industry is one of the few examples of a work site in which language is produced and sold to a specific audience and constitutes therefore an ideal terrain for the sociolinguistic investigation of how linguistic diversity is used, managed, and regulated, as well as for how it impacts the involved speakers (Heller et al. 2014a). Processes of linguistic commodification are characteristic of the new work order in the neoliberal economy, where language is simultaneously the means of production and the product (Ducheˆne and Heller 2012a). Tourism as a service industry par excellence uses the language skills of its workers in different ways as an economic resource (Ducheˆne and Piller 2011). On a technical-material level, workers’ multilingual skills serve as a tool and allow them to provide information and services to consumers in several languages. At the same time, workers are expected to embody and to perform authenticity through locally marked language practices. In the neoliberal logic, language/multilingual competencies are no longer solely considered an innate talent, but are also understood to be measureable skills in which speakers can invest (e.g. through language courses) and that can be disciplined, standardized, and exploited for production and services (Cameron 2000; Ducheˆne and Heller 2012b; Lorente 2010). According to their position within the company, their task areas, and the nature of host–guest contact, tourism workers need skills in different languages and a high linguistic flexibility. Hall-Lew and Lew argue that touristic marketing discourses transmit particular images of the local linguistic situation of a destination. Subsequently, guests arrive with certain expectations about a region and might be surprised or disappointed if the expected linguistic performance is not realized by the tourism workers (Hall-Lew and Lew 2014, p. 342). This is quite often the case, because the tourism industry employs a large number of workers who are immigrants themselves and who do not necessarily correspond to the linguistic and ethnic expectations of the guests (Baum et al. 2008). Much literature has been written on ‘host–guest interaction’, in which the linguistic performances of tourism workers has been investigated with regard to their function as a marker of local identity, of authenticity, and of expert knowledge (Coupland and Coupland 2014), and also as a method of self-exoticization or differentiation (Bunten 2008). Other authors have examined how hosts accommodate their linguistic performance to guests (sometimes in an institutionalized way through training), and vice versa (Jaworski et al. 2003; Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; Lawson and Jaworski 2007; Smith and Brent 2001). But only a few studies have documented step by step how these (staged) performances are developed and what kind of language policy is adopted (Heller 2008; Pujolar and Jones 2011). Scholars
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investigating the commodification of language by employing a processual methodology are interested in the way language practices and/or speakers are managed, disciplined and regulated in order to be fit for commodification as well as in the ensuing consequences for these speakers (Ducheˆne 2009, p. 28). This paper focuses on the language policing of two touristic institutions as they commodify local bilingualism for touristic purposes. It provides a detailed overview on how these institutions decide which language performances can be applied for which market(s) and how they eventually manage, package, and adjust the local languages to make them consumable. Therefore, I will highlight which principles of market logic and which assumptions about language(s) and their speakers (in terms of language ideologies) (Silverstein 1979; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994) underlie their policies.
Bilingualism matters The town of Murten (in French: Morat) is situated on the intra-national (Swiss) German–French language border in the bilingual canton of Fribourg in Switzerland. Due to its peripheral, rural location and its relatively late connection to the country’s rail- and highway system, the region of Murten could not develop any significant industrial sector; however it profited from its natural resources, fertile soils and water, which allowed the region to become one of the most prolific producers of vegetables in Switzerland. Besides, tourism presents the key economic sector for the typical lake-side summer destination Murten. In addition to some sport and music events, its main touristic activities are guided tours through the medieval old town of Murten which often highlight that the region has been historically bilingual. The approximately 8000 inhabitants of Murten are mostly (Swiss) German-speaking (83%), with a small French-speaking minority (15%).1 Language and especially local bilingualism is a topic of a certain political polemic that is constantly debated in the media. This is not only the case in Murten, but in the whole country. Multilingual Switzerland has four official languages (German, French, Italian and Romansh) and organizes its linguistic diversity by applying the principle of territoriality. This principle determines the exclusive language of public services and education for every one of the four language territories that are delineated by welldefined language borders. Some officially bilingual cantons (Fribourg, Bern, and Valais) and the trilingual canton Graubu¨nden present an exception to this principle and provide public services and education in two languages, though not necessarily in the whole canton, but at least in specific bilingual communities. In addition, the Germanspeaking part of Switzerland has what is usually called a diglossic situation. The local dialects, commonly known as Swiss German, are used primarily for oral communication, while Standard German is used in the written context or in formal situations. The diglossic situation often causes problems for speakers of the other national languages. Even if they have learned (Standard) German at school, it does not necessarily enable them to understand the locally spoken Swiss German varieties. Furthermore, the 1
http://www.murten-morat.ch/de/portrait/zahlenundfakten/zahlenfakten. Accessed 08 March 2017.
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German-speaking part of the country has the largest surface area and the greatest number of speakers. The image of the (Swiss) German majority as oppressor of the French-, Italian- and Romansh minorities is omnipresent in media discourses. The latent tension between the speakers of the two languages is noticeable in Murten, too. Murten’s linguistic diversity often causes it to be described as a miniature Switzerland because it is a minority (Swiss German-speaking in the primarily French-speaking Canton of Fribourg) within a minority (French-speaking in the mostly Germanspeaking Switzerland). The point is that both Swiss German-speakers and Frenchspeakers are playing the ‘minority card’ when it comes to political decisions. Despite these tensions between the speakers of the two languages, bilingualism has recently been promoted, celebrated, acknowledged and even appropriated for (among others) touristic purposes by means of different measures of local institutions: •
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Since the early 2000s Murten has been marketing itself to business startups by highlighting its bilingual population as an advantage. This is in addition to highlighting their bilingualism to tourists as an attraction in and of itself. In 2009, a bilingual comic festival had been organized for the first time in the neighbouring village of Murten. The event took place a second time in October 2013. However, due to a lack of demand, the festival was not held again. In 2011, an association has been founded with the aim to promote local bilingualism. One of its main activities is to award companies who are operating bilingually for their usage of both languages. The local museum was one of the awarded institutions: it has a bilingual logo and web page, and it provides bilingual signage for every exhibition. Furthermore, guided tours can be booked in German as well as in French. This had not always been the case. Only some years ago, the museum had still been operating mostly in German. In 2012 a new culinary guided tour has been created by the tourist office, which, henceforward, is offered in German or in French, but on one date every season it is also offered bilingually. In 2015, the Canton of Fribourg launched the Day of Bilingualism, which has since been celebrated every year on the 26th of September.
These initiatives well reflect the increasing symbolical, political, and economic status of bilingualism in Murten—and even in the whole canton—at present. Similar strategies can be noticed in the neighboring bilingual canton of Bern and the city of Biel, where bilingualism is increasingly perceived as an attractive and distinctive economic resource and also as a strategic asset (Flubacher and Ducheˆne 2012). These significant social and economic transformations of peripheral sites that are now capitalizing on their local languages are increasingly noticeable not only in Switzerland, but also in different bi- and multilingual regions over the last 30 years (Heller 2008; Pietika¨inen and Kelly-Holmes 2013). I am concentrating on the bilingual guided tour in Murten because it is emblematic of how the touristic appropriation of local languages happens as one strategy to promote the economic development of the region, therefore allowing me to examine, how this also entails a policing of languages and speakers.
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Methodology and data In order to examine how Murten’s bilingualism is packaged to be turned into a touristic activity and economic resource, I draw on ethnographic research I conducted in the tourism industry of Murten between 2013 and 2016 in the framework of a project entitled ‘‘Formulation, Performance and Instrumentalisation of the German–French Language Border in Swiss Tourism’’. Using an ethnographic approach has allowed me to examine in detail not only how language is used as a social practice within a specific (historical and politico-economical) context, but also how it comes that it is used in this way, what the concerned speakers think about language, and why or with what assumptions of language (Heller 2002). Another benefit of using an ethnographic approach lies in the possibility to analyze complex social phenomena in a processual perspective and thus to overcome the often criticized micro–macro-dichotomy (Cicourel 2014). The data for this paper contains several interviews with the two authors/ performers of the theatrical bilingual guided tour, as well as interviews with the directors of the two involved institutions, the local tourist office, and the local museum. I documented the tour twice, once by filming it and once by making an audio recording of the tour, and I also took field notes and collected promotional material and press articles. The authors shared their script with me, which documents not only most of the text of the tour, but also gives stage directions on 17 pages in both French and Standard German. Furthermore, I drew on institutional knowledge that I acquired during participant observation in both the tourist office and the museum relying on recordings, interview—as well as interactional data. For the analysis of my data, I drew on the analytical framework proposed by Ducheˆne (2009, p. 31) and focused on policing processes in terms of the selection of linguistic resources, their standardization, their flexibilisation, and their exploitation by answering the following guiding questions: What forms of policing (i.e. disciplining, regulation, control, etc.) of language(s) (and of bilingualism in particular) come with this staged performance of bilingualism? How is language regulated and by whom? What assumptions (rationales) about Murten and its history, as well as about the public attending these performances, underpin this policing? What effects do these assumptions have for the ways in which these performances are staged and for whom are they perceived as being legitimate and authentic tourism experiences?
Analysis As the director of Murten’s tourist office once pointed out in an interview with me, a bilingual performance can be profitable only under the condition that it be understandable not only to a niche market of bilingual people, but also to monolingual French- and German-speakers. The following subchapters investigate how these conditions are created and describe particular (language) policies. Therefore, I concentrate on different moments of the development of the tour and
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analyze how languages/speakers are regulated and by whom: I begin with an analysis of the emergence and the development of the bilingual performance and the underlying interests and (market) logic; then, I demonstrate how, by whom, and for whom the product is conceptualized, followed by how different, contradictory linguistic requirements are managed during the conceptualization phase; and end by explaining why this performance is an example of a successful attempt of commodification of bilingualism in the context of tourism. Responding to an unpredictable market I was doing ethnographic fieldwork in the tourism industry of Murten in early 2013, when I heard about the idea of a new guided tour that would be performed bilingually. Guided tours are the key product of Murten’s touristic activities and the most important source of own revenues of the local tourist office, institution that is organizing the tours. The tourist office employs about 35 guides and offers around 10 different thematic guided tours. According to the annual report of the tourist office, in 2012, these tours were given mainly in (Swiss)German (86%), in French (10%) or in English (3%). Murten is characterized by regional and day tourism. Locals and visitors from the surrounding (Swiss) German- or French-speaking regions and a small number of international guests mainly from neighboring Germany and France compose the majority of the tourist market. Every year, around 8000 visitors discover the town in the framework of a guided tour. In order to provide regular visitors with new offers and to attract new visitors, the tourist office is regularly adapting, extending, or diversifying its tours. In 2012, a decline in the number of tour participants had been observed and interpreted as an index of saturation of the current market. It seemed as if most of the regular visitors would have already participated in the existing tours and a new tour offer seemed to be the necessary answer. At the same time, the local museum was trying to boost the number of visitors through innovations within their own touristic offer, mainly in the form of guided tours through the museum and frequently changing temporary exhibitions. The efforts of the tourist office and the museum to attract new visitors and keep old ones ended in the shared desire to create a new tour. At that time, a collaboration between the two institutions already existed in the common offer of a guided tour through the old town and the museum conducted in either French or German. The two directors of the tourist office and the museum decided to ask two of their collaborators, whom we will call Franc¸ois and Vroni, to design the new tour that would show the town and the museum in a new light. When it came to the creation of new tours, tour guides in Murten were typically responsible for the creation themselves, but it was expected that their product would be in agreement with the tourist office’s policies and current needs. No new tour was realized without approval from the director of the tourist office and his team. The creation of new tours can therefore be understood as a mix of top-down and bottomup measures. With their excellent competencies in French and German, their acting experience and/or experience as tour guides, and their institutional knowledge about the politics of the museum and the tourist office, Franc¸ois and Vroni seemed to be
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the right persons for the task of creating an innovative tour. Franc¸ois, a French native speaker and retiree who was doing small jobs for the museum in his free time, had completed the tourist office’s guide training and was working as a Frenchspeaking tour guide. Vroni, originally from Germany, had not completed the training, but was at that time employed by the same tourist office as an actress in a quite popular theatrical guided tour on female personalities of Murten. She had prior experience in creating tours due to her involvement in the creation of the women’s tour. Franc¸ois and Vroni had already worked together bilingually with great success in another theatrical context and therefore proposed a bilingual and theatrical format as the innovation for the joint tour of the museum and the tourist office. Their idea was to design a comical and theatrical walk that would lead through the old town and end in the local museum. Instead of overwhelming participants by dispensing a lot of information at different stops as is often typical in conventional tours, the two guides would enact theatrical scenes at each stop while dressed up as different local personalities in order for the participants to learn more about the town’s history. The town’s squares and cafe´s, as well as the museum, would be used to stage the local history in both French and German. The director of the museum was enthusiastic about the idea of a bilingual tour that was aligned with the museum’s mission of promoting local bilingualism, a condition that was fixed as an obligation in its funding agreement with the city’s administration. Furthermore, the idea to frame the new tour offer bilingually was also consistent with the series of initiatives that were currently aiming to acknowledge and promote local bilingualism. For this reason, the museum’s director was convinced that the local population would certainly appreciate the new product. In contrast to the museum’s director, the director of the tourist office took a quite skeptical stance towards the idea of a bilingual performance, as he expressed in an interview with me. A former attempt to provide a culinary guided tour in two languages had failed at various times in the past because, instead of speakers of both languages booking those tours, only Swiss German-speakers had participated. The idea of the bilingual performance of the culinary tour was based on the promotion of the exchange between bilingual French- and German-speaking tour participants; however, as this was not the audience that actually participated, the guide had conducted the tour completely in Swiss German in the end. The unpredictability of the market was one aspect that made the director question the whole project. He further remarked that, even if local bilingualism was highly politicized and one of the media’s favorite topics, it would not necessarily attract (inter)national tourists. Despite the political tensions around local bilingualism, the director of the tourist office considered the co-presence of (Swiss) German and French, at least in Murten, as a resource for the tourism industry. Bilingualism in terms of the local populations’ respectively the tourism workers’ competencies in both languages/varieties, allowed to accommodate to the visitors’ linguistic need or desire. In this economic view, the director of the tourist office conceptualized language as a working tool and bilingualism as a guarantee for delivering a service flexibly in at least two languages. However, he warned that a product designed for bilingual speakers would unnecessarily reduce the potential audience to a niche market.
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Therefore, a bilingual product would be only profitable if it were also comprehensible for monolingual (Swiss) German- and French-speakers and adapted to any possible audience constellations with regard to the unpredictability of the market. In the end, the two directors decided to give the bilingual project a chance, and the museum provided a budget of 2.000 CHF for the production, equipment (costumes and accessories), and marketing (flyer). The tourist office did not invest any money for the development of the performance, but promised to administer the booking procedure once the tour would be ready. Scripting the performance Having proposed the bilingual performance, Vroni and Franc¸ois then had to find a way to represent local bilingualism in an attractive, authentic, but still intelligible manner. There were many constraints. Firstly, their performance should be able to reach a market of monolingual speakers of both languages and bilingual speakers at the same time. Secondly, the tour should entertain equally local as well as (inter)national tour participants with different linguistic requirements and background knowledge. These premises entailed a lot of questions of how to select and package the languages to turn them into a tourist offer that could be sold on the tourist market, which, in the case of Murten, is still primarily composed of local and national Swiss German-speaking visitors with clear ideas of which languages are authentically local. The claim of authenticity, logically indexed by the local Swiss German variety, and reaching an international or dominantly francophone audience with maybe few skills in Standard German but no skills in Swiss German, is intrinsically contradictory. Language is on the one hand considered an expression of authentic local identity, and on the other as a working tool to flexibly deliver information to a broad international audience. The mission of inventing a linguistic performance, adapted to any possible but unpredictable audience constellation of mixed monolingual and/or bilingual speakers, demanded certain linguistic choices, as well as preparatory work with regard to the selection of the content and its staging. Thus, the following chapter focusses on the policing strategies that were guiding the linguistic choices of the two authors during the conceptualization phase of the tour. A lot of reading and research about the local history of Murten characterized the first part of this phase. The two authors were looking for inspiration and participated in another theatrical bilingual tour that was offered in a neighboring town. They had to prevent themselves from not making the same mistakes twice that had been made in former attempts by the tourist office, such as giving the same information repeatedly first in one and then in the other language, thereby always excluding and boring one part of the group for several minutes. To overcome this risk of incomprehension and boredom, Vroni and Franc¸ois had to find other ways than only translating the information in the respective other language. When in the conceptualization phase of the tour I inquired about their intended strategies in order to provide information in both languages, Vroni explained (in German):
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VRONI: ja (.) ja da gibts (2) verschiedenste sachen (2) es ¨bersetzung sein= darf einfach net eine eins zu eins u des wird oz langweilig. teilweise muss man halt informationen in der einen sprache liefern, die man ¨bersetzt, aber vielleicht zu nem (.) in die andere u ¨teren zeitpunkt in nem anderen kontext erwa ¨hnt. spa ¨hm (.) mir versuchn zeichnerisch zu unterstreichen a ¨rpersprache (.) mimisch (.) durch szenen wo klare ko oder klare situationen vorgeben .h dass ma ma muss nicht jedes wort verstehen ma muss n zammahang verstehen. ja. sind aber dann auf bestimmte punkte fixiert wo ma sagen nein das muss (.) sein Translation VRONI: well (.) yeah there are (2) very different things (2) it just does not have to be a one to one translation = that would be too boring. to some extent we have to deliver information in one language that we (.) translate in the other language, but maybe later or we mention it in another context. uhm (.) we try to integrate graphics (.) gestural mimic art (.) setting scenes through body language or clear situations .h one one does not have to understand every word one has to understand the context. yeah. but then we have to concentrate on certain aspects where we have to say no this is necessary to mention Their idea was not to be understood word for word by everyone, but rather making the content easily comprehensible through an entertaining enactment of the message. Vroni and Franc¸ois tried out different ways to transpose the town’s history into bilingual constellations: speaking at the same time in French and German, switching quickly between both languages and translating alternately, visualizing with the help of graphics or other accessories, and enacting contextual information, among other things. Leaving nothing to chance, they decided to script their linguistic performance in detail and to learn it by heart. When I asked the two authors which languages they intended to use during the tour, they specified their choice of French and Standard German—but not Swiss German. This specific constellation resulted from the deficient Swiss German skills of Vroni, and the soperformed bilingualism did not correspond to the locally spoken variety of German that in turn might be perceived as a lack of authenticity by one part of the audience. Vroni was very well aware of this problem. In the interview, she underlined the fact that most tour participants were at least partly originally from the region with very clear ideas about an authentic performance of local bilingualism in terms of French and the local Swiss German variety, and about who is legitimate to perform both local languages and the town’s history. Vroni obviously did not fit this linguistically desired profile and her Standard German revealed her Southern German origins. She told me about other tours where her Standard
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German had provoked some reactions such as whispering and mocking by locals. However, she added that, over the course of a tour, she always succeeded to convince the audience of her legitimacy through her professionalism and her acting. Furthermore, in Switzerland, Standard German is perceived as the language of literature and theater (with the exception of particular theater pieces written in dialect). The choice of giving the bilingual tour a theatrical format avoids the sensible question of authenticity indexed by the use of local Swiss German dialect and legitimizes the use of Standard German as the stage language. Furthermore, the performance in Standard German permits international visitors as well as (local) French-speaking participants with basic (school) knowledge of Standard German to understand the German-speaking parts of the tour. Vroni and Franc¸ois justified their specific language choice by arguing that it was a conscious decision to provide linguistic accommodation to this particular audience. By using the most common varieties, the authors trivialized the complexity of the local linguistic diversity, ignoring the coexistence of Swiss German, German, and French in favor of making the performance accessible to a wider audience (Kelly-Holmes 2000; Pietika¨inen and Kelly-Holmes 2011). To ensure that the acting performance of the bilingual tour worked out as imagined, Franc¸ois and Vroni gave the draft of their script to a theater director to proofread and tested the comprehension of certain scenes in the framework of an audition with the staff of both the tourist office and the museum. Performing, consuming and marketing bilingualism: a team play The bilingual tour had its premiere in October 2013. As a marketing strategy, the local media had been invited to the event. Franc¸ois and Vroni appeared disguised in caricatured costumes embodying two stereotypical linguistic roles of a French- and a German-speaking character. Vroni, dressed colorfully and extravagantly, enacted the role of a fictive German-speaking museum’s director, a very dominant and selfconfident character, while Franc¸ois, with a French beret on his head, played the role of the French-speaking caretaker of the museum. His character was a rather bearish and dreamy person who had to be admonished by the bossy director all the time. The enactment of bilingualism in terms of the two linguistic roles overcame the earlier physical separation that had been the case when groups were split in two. But still, through this performance, the two languages were again kept apart and the performance presented a somewhat parallel monolingualism. This staging can be interpreted as a parody of the Swiss language situation itself, mocking the difficulties that speakers of different national languages have when it comes to understand each other. Furthermore, the roles of the museum’s director and caretaker seemed to be based on the national stereotypes of the different linguistic communities in Switzerland, the hardworking, dominant and commanding Swiss German and the lazy, but romantic French-speaking Romand2—who has actually the less prestigious job. This performance could also be interpreted as a hint to the local minority situation of the French speakers and the dominance of the Germanspeaking majority. The performance of two different linguistic roles with different
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‘‘Romand’’ is a term used to describe the French-speaking population in Switzerland.
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‘‘cultures’’ is joining the modern discourse of linking languages to cultures and identities (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Heller et al. 2014b). Over the course of the tour, Vroni and Franc¸ois from time to time abandoned their basic roles to embody different personalities who had played a relevant role in the local history, such as a military commander who in the Middle Ages had won a decisive victory at Murten in 1476, a French-speaking local chief magistrate who was under the command of Napoleon, and the female family members of a famous (Swiss) German-speaking author who had a great influence on his writing. These characters are well known in Switzerland and especially in the region, but not necessarily on an international level. The choice of staging very local (Swiss) ‘‘heroes’’ can be explained by the orientation towards a market mainly composed of locals or visitors coming from other regions of Switzerland. The different characters were not only recognizable for the majority of the public (the locals), but also signaled an attempt to appeal to a sense of local or national identity and pride. The separated enactment of bilingualism in terms of rather monolingual linguistic roles instead of characters with bilingual competences in both languages presents the local linguistic situation as a historically grounded coexistence of two separated linguistic communities (a French and German one) and reflects, at least one part of, the targeted audience. At the same time, the guides themselves were deconstructing the initially created monolingual image of their roles by code switching, translating, and brokering in order to make their performance accessible for a potentially monolingual audience, too. This becomes clear from the following example, an excerpt of the script (page 11) that the guides followed by heart during the realization of the documented tour (Vroni is speaking in German, Franc¸ois in French): ´on Wir schreiben das Jahr 1779: Der grosse Napole ist auf der Durchreise und trifft in Murten ¨llig auf den Fribourger Staatsmann Louis zufa d’Affry. Franc ¸ois: (fort avec emphase) ´on fut le fruit du hasard. Ma rencontre avec Napole ´on C’est un incident technique qui a retenu Napole ` Morat en 1779. a ´ons Vroni: Reiner Zufall war es, weil das Rad von Napole Kutsche in Meyriez gebrochen ist. ´e de son carrosse Napole ´on Franc ¸ois: A cause de la roue brise ˆ faire halte a ` Morat. Bonaparte a du
Vroni:
Translation: ´on the Great was passing through It’s 1779: Napole the region and met haphazardly the statesman Louis d’Affry from Fribourg in Murten. Franc ¸ois: ?(loudly and emphatically) ((stage direction))? ´on was a fruit of fate. A My encounter with Napole ´on back at Murten technical breakdown held Napole in 1779.
Vroni:
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´on’s carriage Pure chance that the wheel of Napole had broken in ?Meyriez ((neighboring village))?. Franc ¸ois: Because of a broken wheel on his carriage, ´on Bonaparte had to make a stop at Murten. Napole Vroni:
While Franc¸ois was embodying the role of French-speaking Louis d’Affry, a local historical personality, Vroni acted as interpreter in order to explain, translate, or mediate Franc¸ois’ alias, Louis d’Affry’s narrative to the audience in German. This brokering took several forms (e.g. summarizing, giving/translation information at different moments) always with the objective of mobilizing and making the performance flexible, while also making a piece in one language comprehensible for monolingual speakers of the other language. Every interaction, whether between the two guides or between the guide(s) and the audience, was planned and controlled. Usually, during classical tours, the tour participants can ask questions about what may affect the tour’s flow or distract from the actual topic. To prevent such a type of interruption and to make sure that the performance was not left to chance but instead corresponded exactly to how the authors had imagined it, the interaction with the audience was minimized to only some interactive moments. These were typically introduced by one of the two guides and instructed, guided, and controlled during the interaction. In these moments, the tour participants became part of the bilingual performance, as in the following excerpt of the transcription of the recorded tour, where Vroni has to guide the group for a moment all alone. She stops under a linden tree and initiates the interaction with the group. VRONI:
TOURISTE 1: VRONI:
TOURISTE 1: VRONI: TOURISTE 1: VRONI:
`. QUESTION QUESTION. (10) qui sait sous ?voila quel arbre je me trouve maintenant/ c’est quoi ´/ il est/ qui a une ide ´e/ ¸a/ he c un tilleul un TILLEUL. exactement. super. un ti:- j’ai ´s a ` prononcer ce mot. toujours des difficulte ˆtre vous pouvez le toujours, si je vous peut e donne le signe, vous dites ti- tilleul. ((French))? [(.) ?ja/((German))? ?oui/bon [?je dis tilleul. oui. okay et ce n’est pas n’importe quel ti- ((donne le signe)) tilleul oui oui. ((French))? ?also es nicht irgendeine linde. es ist die (.) in vitro fertilisations ur- ur- ur- ur- ur- urenkelin ¨nglichen murtenlinde. ((German))? der urspru ˆtre ((inaud)) ?vous pouvez traduire peut e ˆt s’il vous plaı
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TOURISTE 1:
VRONI:
ah oui oui oui oui oui parce que c’est un descendant origi- (.) nelle du tilleul de morat `. voila `. ((French))? oui. voila
Translation: VRONI:
TOURIST 1: VRONI:
TOURIST 1: VRONI: TOURIST 1: VRONI:
TOURIST 1: VRONI:
?voila`. QUESTION QUESTION. (10) who knows under what tree i am standing right now/ what’s that/ eh/ that’s/ who has an idea/ a linden a linden. exactly. great. a li:- i have always some troubles to pronounce that word. maybe you could always, when i give you a sign, you could say li- linden. ((French))? [(.) ?yeah ((German))? ?yes/ good [i say linden. yes. okay and that’s not any li- ((gives the sign)) linden yes yes. ((French))? ?well, not any linden. it is the (.) in vitro fertilisation grand- grandgrand- grand- granddaughter of the original linden of murten. ((German))? ?could you maybe translate ((inaud)) please ah yes yes yes yes yes because it is an origin(.) al descendant of the linden of murten yes. right. right. ((French))?
Vroni is still performing her German-speaking role, but she has to switch into French to voice her persona. It seems as if she would be more legitimate to perform the German part. Therefore, she invites and uses the audience to produce the French discourse. She continues her speech, wildly mixing French and German in the same sentence and asking the audience for the translation into French of some sentences in German. Her bilingual performance is spontaneous and characterized by faltering and reformulations. With her clumsy enactment in both languages, she encourages the audience to help her with the pronunciation or with translations. However, the interaction with the audience is at every moment regulated and controlled by her, initiating the tour participants’ reaction by asking a question or giving a sign, and stopping or framing their contribution by confirming it similar to a teacher-studenttalk. Finally, this narrative part seems to be the result of a teamwork between the guide and the tour participants. The tour participants become part of the bilingual performance in terms of working consumers and (co-)contribute actively to the lived tourist experience (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder 2011), but within a tightly controlled framework.
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The tour has turned out to be very popular with visitors up to the present (end of 2016). During the two documented tours, I could observe how the tour participants (coming—as predicted—mostly from the region or at least from Switzerland), were enthusiastic about the way the two actors presented historical facts and polemical topics about local bilingualism. A good atmosphere and a lot of laughter characterized the tour, and, at the end, the two performers always received a big round of applause. Former tour participants made a lot of word-of-mouth recommendations. Journalists of regional newspapers who had been invited to the tour wrote about it and, by publicizing the tour, made it better known. One of the positive customer comments on the website of the tourist office describes the tour as an ‘‘once-in-a-lifetime experience.’’ The bilingual enterprise gained its success because the coexistence of French and German on site is perceived as an important characteristic of the local population, and therefore also as an important characteristic of the consumer’s identity (composed mainly of locals who seemed either to be interested in engaging with the respective other language or to be bilingual themselves). The valuation process of the bilingual performance turned out to be a co-construction by the stakeholders, the performers and the consumers, based firstly on the mutual complicity of the producers and consumers about the value of bilingualism, secondly on their collaboration in performing bilingualism during the tour, and thirdly on the joint promotion of the tour in terms of the contribution of journalists and word-of-mouth recommendations of the consumers (Kelly-Holmes and Pietika¨inen 2014; Morgan and Pritchard 1998; Pritchard and Morgan 2001). The tour turned out to be an effective measure against the previous decline in the number of visitors to the museum, as well as the number of booked tours of the tourism office. Introduced in the end of 2013, the tour was booked fifty-four times in 2014 and brought the museum around 900 visitors. In 2015, it was booked forty-two times. Finally, the bilingual skills and performative talent of Vroni and Franc¸ois had not only been successfully transformed into money, they had also been used in a new way to promote the town and to attract visitors who contribute to the local economy.
Conclusion This article has investigated how bilingualism gets ‘touristified’ and commercialized as one strategy to reflate the local economy. In our case, guided tours appeared as a field in which bilingualism is institutionally managed in different ways to appeal to tourists. Tracing the development of the tour from the perspective of linguistic management has brought to light different strategic policies that regulate the performance of bilingualism and adjust it for a heterogeneous market. The theatrical bilingual guided tour presented here is in an emblematic example of successfully converting a linguistic resource into an economic one, or of converting local ‘pride’ into ‘profit’ for the tourism industry (Ducheˆne and Heller 2012c). After having recognized the need for a new tour offer, the two tourist institutions identified local bilingualism, a highly politicized topic and important characteristic of the local identity, as a resource that might be commodifiable in a tourist market of local and (inter)national,
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mono- and bilingual speakers of French and (Swiss) German. This market has very different, sometimes even contradictory linguistic requirements, and apart from this is quite unpredictable. To anticipate and to respond in the best way possible to this market in all of its possible constellations, the authors regulated the tour’s language by adopting a theatrical tour format and scripting the (linguistic as well as embodied) performance. The adopted innovative theatrical format not only legitimizes the use of Standard German instead of Swiss German as the stage language, but also allows the bridging of linguistic gaps with non-verbal communication strategies. Furthermore, it permits monolingual and bilingual visitors alike not only to follow, but also to become part of the performance. Adding bilingualism as an innovation to an existing and successful format of a tourist activity means also adding value—not only to the activity, but also to the involved languages. The accommodation to a broader and linguistically heterogeneous market entails new (use) values for particular varieties (e.g. Standard German) and for their speakers. Consequently, existing language hierarchies are challenged and shaped (KellyHolmes and Pietika¨inen 2015). The success of the tour stems from the entrepreneurial investment of the two guides into an important linguistic characteristic of the local identity that has a certain political, cultural, and economic prestige and their selfstylization as easily (and successfully) consumable bilingual products (Urciuoli 2008). Local languages, and particularly bilingualism, in combination with place narratives as well as creativity have become a new economic resource for the touristic/economic development of rather peripheral regions (Dlaske 2015; Flubacher and Ducheˆne 2012). However, this particular staging of bilingualism also has its limits: on the one hand, the two guides have to master both languages to be able to perform the tour, while, on the other, even if they perform bilingually, they represent a parallel monolingualism that cannot cover the complexity of the locally spoken varieties. The adopted performance with two separated linguistic roles interprets the local linguistic identity as a historically grounded coexistence of two monolingual communities of German- and French-speakers, and represents language as a homogenous and bounded system. This reinvention not only reduces the complexity of the local linguistic situation and reproduces modern images, but it also ignores any phenomenon such as the mobility of speakers, their multilingual competences, or language contact. By engaging in this separated linguistic role-playing, the two actors show their own identification with either one or the other language, which simultaneously undermines their legitimacy to perform the respective other language. In moments in which they are acting alone and (would) have to use the respective other language to get their persona voiced, they must first overcome their own illegitimacy by involving the audience, making them provide the translation.
Notes Transcription conventions: (.) Pause [] Overlapping of two utterances = No discernible pause between two speakers’ turns or within a single speaker’s turn
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- Truncation , Clause final intonation . Sentence final falling intonation / Sentence final rising intonation ? Concerned passage ((commentary)) ? mostly used to indicate code-switching [[\\ rapidly speaking
Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Sebastian Muth, Alfonso Del Percio, Alexandre Ducheˆne, Liliane Meyer Pitton, Saskia Witteborn, and the reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions, as well as Philippe Humbert who helped to collect parts of the data for this contribution. Many thanks go further to Cynthia Stoye for making my English more reader-friendly. Any mistakes are my own responsibility. Funding The research project ‘‘Formulation, Performance and Instrumentalisation of the German– French Language Border in Swiss Tourism’’ (Number 143184) was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The grant was jointly held by Prof. Iwar Werlen and Prof. Alexandre Ducheˆne. Research leading to this article has also benefitted from ongoing discussions on the ‘‘new speaker’’ theme as part of the EU COST Action IS1306 network entitled ‘‘New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges’’.
Compliance with ethical standards Conflict of interest The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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Larissa Semiramis Schedel (M.A. University of Strasbourg) is a Ph.D researcher in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology at the Institute of Multilingualism of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and research assistant at the Department of Intercultural Communication and Multilingualism Research of the Institute of Linguistics, Media and Musicology of the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research focuses on the political economy of languages in the context of tourism and on linguistic boundary-making processes on multilingual, globalized worksites. For her thesis, she is drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and investigating the variable economic appropriation of local bilingualism in the tourism sector of the bilingual town of Murten at the intra-national French-German language border in Switzerland.
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