Flexibility in the linguistic landscape during the pandemic: tourism services in Helsinki

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism linguistic landscape in Helsinki has changed. Travel restrictions and safety measures have reduced the number of tourists visiting the city, and as a result, there were fewer multilingual signs and advertisements. Additionally, businesses catering to tourists, such as hotels and restaurants, have closed or reduced their operations. The present research is a combination of tourism and linguistic landscape studies, as well as of investigations into the consequences of the pandemic. The goal is to research how the tourism-oriented companies have adjusted their activities to the new situation linguistically and what their motivation has been, with a focus on the most salient languages in tourism scene of Helsinki. It also investigates what constitutes good language use strategy when a major proportion of foreign clients disappears. The international language English was used more than the other foreign languages but still less than before, and Finnish and Swedish, the two national languages of Finland, took partly its place. The study showed that companies have started to direct their marketing towards domestic travellers. The use of Finnish has increased more than Swedish, whereas the use of foreign languages has decreased.