Petteri Laihonen MULTILINGUALISM AND TOURISM IN TRANSCARPATHIA
Petteri Laihonen
Jyvӓskylӓ, Finland
MULTILINGUALISM AND TOURISM IN TRANSCARPATHIA
The multilingual and multi-ethnic nature of Sub/Transcarpathia has been recognized as a resource for tourism already in the 19th century. My paper investigates a case of contemporary multilingual tourist installment in Transcarpathia, next to the EU border.
Transcarpathian Hungarians have primarily targeted Hungarians from Hungary as sources of heritage tourism. For Hungarian heritage tourists, there are some cultic destinations in Transcarpathia such as the Verecke pass. As a new phenomenon, Ukrainians from the east invest in tourist sites found in the Hungarian enclave. They find the Hungarian image a resource, as I argue is the case for a thermal bath 200 meters from the Hungarian border. This tourist instalment was originally an open air spa during the Soviet period. Now a Ukrainian family from the east has built a luxuriant bath with several Hungarian symbols, such as the statues of Hungarian kings and paintings of Hungarian national events as well as Hungarian folk motifs and Hungarian texts. Most of the functional texts are bilingual, Ukrainian and Hungarian. Some of them are in English and Ukrainian, whereas the menus in a Japanese tea house and official signs on the constituents of the thermal water were only in Ukrainian.
We can notice a global mixture consisting of the use of English in a place where the customers come from the East, and the decision to put a Japanese tea house in a ‘Hungarian’ spa, together with bars and grills serving traditional Hungarian dishes. This indicates that the spa is striking a balance between local flavor and the needs of targeted customers. With regards to aesthetics this is achieved through building the image of a Western installment, indexed by the use of Hungarian emblems and language with some English and Japanese additives. However, at the same time the Ukrainian tourist is assured that all this is available without the troubled crossing of the Schengen border and without having to cope with a non-Slavic language. In this way, also the Hungarian linguistic identity has become commodified and the local Hungarians might ask, who has the right to represent Transcarpathian Hungarian culture and language and how.