Ingrid has just been awarded a research grant by the Emirates Foundation for a 15-months’ project to investigate the social and linguistic challenges in UAE tourism workplaces. This project aims to investigate language practices and language ideologies in tourism-related workplaces in the UAE. An understanding of the language practices and ideologies of a particular workplace can show us how certain employees are excluded from such workplaces and can thus inform language policy and planning to facilitate Emirati access to workplaces in the tourism sector.
Tourism is a major sector of the contemporary global economy and of increasing importance in the UAE. It is also an industry in which language and communication skills are of very high importance, i.e. a large proportion of tourist work is language work. However, language aspects of the UAE tourism industry have not been considered to date and this project will thus serve to increase empirical knowledge about language use in and the language needs of an important industry in the UAE.
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