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In current intercultural advertising in Europe, languages are used not for their communicative function (what could be termed their utility value) nor any of the other more established functions of language in advertising communication, for example persuasion or hyperbole. Instead, it is their symbolic function that has come to have the greater value. Thus, it is unimportant whether the advertisee understands the foreign word in an advertisement, so long as it calls up the cultural stereotype of the country with which the language is associated. We have, therefore, in Marx's terms 'form without content'. Language in intercultural advertising has become fetished, imbued with value, existing as a thing on its own. In this article, the existence and functioning of language fetish in European advertising is explored. By examining a range of both pan-European advertisements and specifically intercultural advertisements, we can see how languages have become fetished with values based on deep-seated perceptions of the cultural identities of other European countries and regions.

In this article we use ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to examine how the labelling of tourist souvenirs affects, and is in turn affected by, the local political economy of language of a tourist destination, which is also a minority language space. We begin by arguing for the importance of our particular focus of study, souvenir labels, in the process of global and local tourism, and consequently as evidence of the interplay of languages, politics and economics. We then consider the distinctive features of the local political economy of language in our particular case study, the multilingual Sámi village of Inari in Northern Finland. In a related discussion, we describe how Inari functions as a site of experiential cultural tourism, and how the purchase of souvenirs is part of the tourist experience. We then go on to describe a number of practices that we have observed in the choice and use of linguistic and visual resources for the labelling of souvenirs in Inari, the delicate balancing act that takes place in these practices between authenticity and mobility, and how this reflects and is reflected in the local political economy of language.

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