Popularization and accessibility in travel guidebooks for children in English

Tourist guidebooks are among the most investigated genres in tourism discourse both for their function and for their linguistic features. Through language, they lead the tourists and their “tourist gaze” (Urry 2002; Urry and Larsen 2012) in their real or imaginary journey. They also mediate the tourist experience. They contribute to closing the gap between the tourists’ culture and the destination’s culture (Fodde and Denti 2005), and make culture-specific knowledge and specialized concepts accessible. Guidebooks for children represent an interesting subgenre in this regard. Children generally do not have well-established cultural filters and needs. Their “tourist gaze” still needs to be built and developed and their expectations about the destination (if any) might be completely different from those of the adult travellers. Moreover, the contents presented must be suitable for their cognitive abilities and general knowledge. In this paper, guidebooks for children are discussed in terms of popularization discourse and accessibility. More specifically, data from guidebooks for children between the ages of 6 and 12 are discussed. Focus is on the structural and linguistic properties which emerge from the need to make new information suitable for the intended readers.