Representing Asia: The Language of Tourism Slogans

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the representation of Asia in tourism industry by analyzing the slogans of 23 countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia. The slogans were taken from online tourism sites and college students answered a self-designed and semistructured survey to rank the countries’ slogans. Findings show that the top five ranked countries’ slogans include The Philippines, Maldives, Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea. On the other hand, the lowest five country slogans are from Brunei, Laos, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Mongolia. Furthermore, the data reveal that (70%) of the respondents’ ranking is influenced by the sloganswhile (20%) of the respondents answered otherwise. Another 10% expressed that their ranking was based on their personal preference. In the linguistic analysis of the 23 slogans, findings show that the lexical choices foreground national labels by mentioning the country in the slogans while Asia as a continental label is implied using back grounding. The semantic analysis on tropes in the slogans shows that metaphor is common in ten (10) countries. The analysis suggests that Asia as a tourist destination has been decentered (3 slogans mentioned Asia) while specific countries are highly emphasized in twenty (20) slogans. As this study has shown, country slogans are still pivotal in promoting and branding Asia to the rest of the world while claiming each country’s unique and diverse identity.