Some 2 million tourists visit Iceland annually while the locals are merely 0,3 million. Despite considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity among the visitors, the language of the Icelandic tourist industry is mostly English.
While Icelandic is the first/native language of about 90% of the present inhabitants in Iceland, both the locals as well as foreign tourists are met with considerable presence of English in Iceland (for an account of the language situation in Iceland see, e.g. Hilmarsson-Dunn & Kristinsson 2013; also, Albury 2016). Documented overt Icelandic language policy (Íslenska til alls 2009) is colored by the perceived threat that Icelandic might be yielding to English in a variety of sectors in Icelandic daily life. Among other things, concerns have been raised as to the language choice of businesses and service providers.
Against this backdrop, the paper firstly describes language choices in some typical tourist-host communication situations, as well as the "tourist linguascape" (cf. Jaworski & Thurlow 2010) in downtown Reykjavik (capital city of Iceland), e.g. English vs. Icelandic in marketing of tourist services, in linguistic inscriptions and signs, etc. Secondly, a variety of examples from language policy discourses among locals are analyzed. The locals often express their dislike of the growing presence of English in the public space, in restaurants etc. At the same time, some pieces of the Icelandic literary and linguistic heritage have been made available for tourist consumption.
References:
Albury, Nathan. 2016. National language policy theory: exploring Spolsky’s model in the case of Iceland. Language Policy 15(4):335-372.
Hilmarsson-Dunn, Amanda & Ari Páll Kristinsson. 2013. The language situation in Iceland. In: Language Planning in Europe: Cyprus, Iceland and Luxembourg. Robert B. Kaplan, Richard B. Baldauf, Jr. & Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu eds. Routledge. Pp. 100‒169.
Íslenska til alls [Icelandic for everything. Icelandic language policy]. 2009. Reykjavik: Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. http://www.islenskan.is/Islenska_til_alls.pdf
Jaworski, Adam & Crispin Thurlow. 2010. Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Toward a Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships. In: The Handbook of Language and Globalization. Nikolas Coupland ed. Blackwell. Pp. 255-286.
