Examining authority in the linguistic landscape of a glocalized cultural tourism space in southern Thailand

In cultural tourism spaces, where the identity and heritage of a place and its community are key attractors for travellers, language often plays a key role in communicating authenticity. Yet what is truly authentic is often contested, particularly when it comes to the relationship between top-down policies focussed on economic growth and members of the local community. In this paper, we examine an emerging cultural tourism space, the Old Town area of the Southern Thai city of Songkhla. We consider how the linguistic landscape of this space reflects an interaction between different levels of authority, focussing particularly on how state power is counter-balanced by authoritative decision-making of local business owners. Drawing on a combination of photographic data and interviews with sign-makers, we observe a range of different resources being relied upon to project local, global and glocal identities. Business owners’ designs were often highly creative, featuring hybridisation of different identities, including associations with minoritized communities. In contrast, government-mandated identity management efforts primarily revolved around promoting more standardized representations of language and culture, mirroring wider tendencies for the commercialisation of ethnic identities.