Phraseology and Culture in English

2. Tourism: A very brief background 
By the middle of the 18th century, the phenomenon of the nobility travel-
ling to spas in their own country as well as to cultural and historic sites in 
southern Europe became known as “the tour” (cf. Graburn and Jafari 1991: 
2). The people going on such tours (which at first took two to three years) 
for education and pleasure were accordingly called “tourists”. They often 
wrote down their experiences and adventures, in some literary form or 
other. The most famous of these (in Europe) are probably Goethe’s descrip-
tions of his Italy travels in 1786–88. 
After World War I, the predominance of the aristocracy travelling gave 
way to an increasing development of “ordinary” (still wealthy) people tak-
ing their holidays in contact with nature, sprinkled with the occasional “cul-
tural interest”. Sun- and sea-bathing became famous, just as skiing and 
hiking. This was partly a reaction to industrialisation (escaping the polluted 
cities) and later, notably after WWII, a demonstration of a more sophisti-
cated life-style. 
The tourism industry as we know it today is the third largest industry in 
the world. It emerged in the nineteenth century, notably under the influence 
of Thomas Cook, and has been growing rapidly since the 1930s, after the 
Great Depression in America and Europe. A new impulse came after the 
advent of jet travel in 1952. This was when mass tourism became an inter-
national enterprise. The decline in agricultural employment and loss of in-
dustrial jobs forced regions and cities to seek new sources of business to sur-
vive. Cities and regions intensively compete for tourist money. They often 
take upon themselves substantial transformations in order to become mar-
ketable tourist areas, which indeed affects daily urban life and the authen-
ticity of a region. 
Serious criticism of mass tourism emerged in the 1960s in economic and 
environmental studies. The tourist carrying capacity of regions was investi-
gated in ecological terms as well as with regard to possible multiplier ef-
fects of tourist money, which were often counteracted by local inflation. 
Today, discussions of sustainable tourism or eco-tourism are still going 
strong, trying to steer seasonal mass migration into manageable channels 
and further to prevent tourist infiltration into sensitive natural areas. Socio-
logical studies have criticised folk-representations of modernity and tradi-
tion meeting in tourism, asking whose traditions are more traditional or 
whose modernity is more modern, and in which terms. This is reflected in 
naïve tourist notions of experiencing “authentic” lives and rites of “natives”. 

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The phraseology of tourism 
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