Language and tourism in Cambodia: a multi-case study of the linguistic landscape in Phnom Penh hotels

ABSTRACT

Cambodia’s multilingual and multicultural ecology has in recent decades been largely influenced by globalisation and tourism. International businesses within the tourism industry, such as hotels, often impact the multilingual ecology of societies when they bring with them their linguistic practices and attitudes. This article thus presents the findings from a multi-case study of the linguistic landscape in four hotels in Phnom Penh, which seeks to investigate how language policy and language attitudes influence language use in hotels. A small sample of public signs in four different four-star and five-star hotels was qualitatively analysed and the findings used to complement existing literature on spoken language in hotels. The findings reveal the dominance of English, as well as the visibility of Chinese and Khmer in the linguistic landscape, and the factors contributing to each language’s level of prominence are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Linguistic landscape
• Cambodia
• Phnom Penh
• globalisation
• multilingualism
• language policy
• language attitudes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks their contacts in Cambodia for collecting data on the LL across various hotels. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. The author also thanks Dr Rita Silver and Dr Mark Seilhamer for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Finally, the author is grateful for the NTU Research Scholarship that enables their research work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.