The Local Political Economy of Languages in a Sámi Tourism Destination Authenticity and mobility in the labeling of souvenirs

Sari Pietikäinen (1) , Helen Kelly-Holmes (2)

1 Department of Language and Communication Studies [Jyväskyä]
2 School of languages, litterature, culture and communication

In this article we examine how the labelling of tourist souvenirs affects and is affected by the local political economy of languages in a tourist destination, which is also a minority language space. We begin by arguing for the importance of our particular focus of study, souvenir labels, in the process of global and local tourism, and consequently as evidence of the interplay of languages, politics and economics. In keeping with our discursive ethnographic approach, we then describe distinctive features of the local political economy of languages in our particular case study, the multilingual Sámi village of Inari in Northern Finland, and in a related discussion, we describe how Inari functions as a site of experiential cultural tourism, and how the purchase of souvenirs is part of the tourist experience. We then go on to describe a number of practices that we have observed in the choice and use of linguistic and visual resources for the labelling of souvenirs in Inari, the delicate balancing act that takes place in these practices between authentification and mobility, and how this reflects and is reflected in the local political economy of language.

Mots clés: Social Sciences & Humanities

Sari Pietikäinen, Helen Kelly-Holmes. The Local Political Economy of Languages in a Sámi Tourism Destination Authenticity and mobility in the labeling of souvenirs. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2011, 15 (3), pp.323. ⟨10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00489.x⟩. ⟨hal-00649464⟩