In this ground-breaking contribution to the study of tourism and languages, Alison Phipps examines what happens when tourists learn to speak other languages. From ordering a coffee to following directions she argues for a new perception of the relationship between tourism and languages from one based on the acquisition of basic, functional skills to one which sustains and even strengthens intercultural dialogue. The twelve chapters comprising this book tell stories of the experience of learning and speaking tourist languages. Drawing on a range of disciplines Alison Phipps takes the reader on a journey through risk, way finding, mistakes, laughter, conversations and the imagination. She provides rich descriptions of the world of language learning which has remained invisible to mainstream studies of language education, existing as it does on the margins of educational life. She shows how tourism is shaped by the learning experiences of everyday life. Languages, she argues passionately, fundamentally change the nature of perception, dwelling and relationships to other people and the world. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in tourism studies and in modern languages education. It is a timely study, coming at time of crisis in languages, as English exerts its power as a world language and as a dominant language of tourism. Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life will also be of interest to anthropologists, linguists, geographers, sociologists and those studying education.

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This book is worth reading for reasons of content, style, and mode of research. In concert with other publications in the series, such as Tourism and Intercultural Change: Why Tourism Matters, it is passionately written, electrifying, and insightful. The book is recommended for all interested in the complex relationship between tourism, language, intercultural dialogue, and human interaction.

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Alison Phipps has written a thought-provoking and unusual book, which deserves to be read by tourism academics and, perhaps even more so, by those in mainstream language education who are struggling to keep their discipline alive.

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Alison Phipps' Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival is an inspiring, intellectually and morally provocative book, which is nothing short of a state of the art of theorizing tourism and tourists from a language-sensitive or language-oriented perspective. Phipps offers a view of tourists that is rare and refreshing, and builds on well grounded approaches, which, in my mind, can be generally labelled “post-structural.” Through applying these dynamic and critical perspectives, and not taking anything for granted, Phipps attends to the seemingly ordinary spheres of tourism, and to where the extraordinariness of tourism meets the ordinariness of everyday lives. This juxtaposing—of tourism and everydayness—turns out to be remarkable, because it shows how rather interesting and worthy are everyday lives of some people. In other words, through researching tourists, we gain a contribution to what might we might call the “contemporary human condition,” over and above the contribution to “tourism scholarship.”