‘A taste of this lively language’: attitudes towards languages other than English in lonely planet phrasebooks.

This paper addresses language attitudes towards non-English, mostly non-Western, languages in the phrasebooks published by Lonely Planet for English-speaking travellers to multilingual regions of the Global South. Specifically, this paper examines attitudes towards the languages exemplified in Lonely Planet’s second edition ofAfrica: Phrasebook and Dictionary(2013), second edition ofIndia: Phrasebook and Dictionary(2014), fourth edition ofPidgin: Phrasebook(2015), third edition ofHill Tribes(2008), second edition ofSouth Pacific Phrasebook(2008), and third edition ofSoutheast Asia: Phrasebook and Dictionary(2013). In so doing, this research argues that the phrasebooks describe these languages and their speakers as exotic, monolithic, simplistic, and deterministic; and construct the traveller’s efforts to use these languages as acts of benevolence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]