Aspiring to be global: Language, mobilities, and social change in a tourism village in China
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis contributes to our understanding of the sociolinguistics of globalization by examining a tourism site in Yangshuo County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. A former residential neighborhood street West Street (¿¿Xi Jie) in Yangshuo has been gaining increasing popularity among domestic Chinese tourists, known as a `global village¿ and `English Corner¿, as Yangshuo transformed from an agriculture-based into a tourism-based economy during the past three decades. This observed tourism development in West Street differs from existing research in other tourism communities (see e.g. Heller 2003; Coupland, Garret and Bishop 2005; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010) in that its sociohistorical transformation involves the re-evaluation of non-local, instead of local, linguistic resources. This study investigates this socio-historical change as an issue for the sociolinguistics of mobility (Blommaert 2010), wherein the English language, along with other semiotic resources, is appropriated and commodified for domestic Chinese tourists. Specifically, it seeks to address how has West Street become a `global village¿ and `English Corner¿? What are the tensions arising from this socio-historical change? And what is the role of language and communication in the tensions that arise from the re-imagination of West Street as a global village and English Corner? To address these questions, I look at data collected both online and during three-month fieldwork. These include tourism promotional discourses, tourist writings online, (participant) observations, interviews, field notes, documents, and signage. In analyzing these data, I draw on insights from sociolinguistics, tourism studies, human geography, and applied linguistics to provide multidimensional analytical perspectives into the `global village¿, including place-making, tourist identity and stance, multifunctionality of space, and educational tourism. It is shown that the observed socio-historical transforma…
abstract: This thesis contributes to our understanding of the sociolinguistics of globalization by examining a tourism site in Yangshuo County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. A former residential neighborhood street West Street (¿¿Xi Jie) in Yangshuo has been gaining increasing popularity among domestic Chinese tourists, known as a `global village¿ and `English Corner¿, as Yangshuo transformed from an agriculture-based into a tourism-based economy during the past three decades. This observed tourism development in West Street differs from existing research in other tourism communities (see e.g. Heller 2003; Coupland, Garret and Bishop 2005; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010) in that its sociohistorical transformation involves the re-evaluation of non-local, instead of local, linguistic resources. This study investigates this socio-historical change as an issue for the sociolinguistics of mobility (Blommaert 2010), wherein the English language, along with other semiotic resources, is appropriated and commodified for domestic Chinese tourists. Specifically, it seeks to address how has West Street become a `global village¿ and `English Corner¿? What are the tensions arising from this socio-historical change? And what is the role of language and communication in the tensions that arise from the re-imagination of West Street as a global village and English Corner? To address these questions, I look at data collected both online and during three-month fieldwork. These include tourism promotional discourses, tourist writings online, (participant) observations, interviews, field notes, documents, and signage. In analyzing these data, I draw on insights from sociolinguistics, tourism studies, human geography, and applied linguistics to provide multidimensional analytical perspectives into the `global village¿, including place-making, tourist identity and stance, multifunctionality of space, and educational tourism. It is shown that the observed socio-historical transforma…
author: GAO SHUANG
keywords: language, mobility, globalization, neoliberalism, tourism, China
date published: 2014-01-17
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:33:09Z
provider: National University of Singapore
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: National University of Singapore