ABSTRACT
Critical studies on intercultural communication have predominantly focused on international tourism settings to explore how tour guides and tourists deploy linguistic resources to produce, stylize, and commodify cultural differences. Yet, the interculturality in domestic tour guiding situations has been overlooked so far. Therefore, this chapter proposes to investigate two bilingual guided tours at the intra-national French-Swiss German language border in Switzerland, where guides and tour participants come from the same country/region and share the same language(s). The study views these tours as discursive spaces of identification and resistance, and adopts a critical ethnographic sociolinguistic approach to explore how cultural identities are invoked, negotiated, or challenged in guide-tour participant interactions. The analysis reveals that essentialist ideologies of the interrelation of space, language, ethnicity, and culture are celebrated to build and to consume a sense of group identity and belonging among the guides and the tour participants, but they are at times also contested. By shedding light on how languages are called into being and are used in these touristic activities, this chapter aims at unpacking the role of language in the (re)production of culturalized differences, power relations, and inequalities.
