Tourism plays an important economic role in the Nordics and is high on the agenda of the Nordic Council (The Nordic Council & the Nordic Council of Ministers 2021). The extensive Norwegian coastline provides for one particular type of tourism, i.e., cruise tourism, which has a long-standing tradition among tourists to and in Scandinavia. Established in the 19th century to transport goods along the coast, the “Hurtigruten” Group still maintain daily traffic, transporting cargo and passengers. The black, white and red ships hence play an important role in Norwegian everyday life, with tourists roaming the streets from Bergen to Hammerfest. It is this importance that warrants an analysis of the discourses around cruise tourism and Hurtigruten in Norway, as envisaged by the project.

Besides its relevance for the Nordics and Norway, tourism is an intriguing object of analysis for sociocultural researchers in general. Sociolinguistically, tourism produces interesting contact phenomena in highly diverse social, cultural and linguistic spaces, created as travelers take their languages with them offline and online. Besides the phenomena that emerge in language used by tourists, discourses about tourism and their perception are equally interesting from a sociocultural point of view. The project aims at investigating discourses on advertising cruise tourism and Norwegian culture in Norway, as well as the perception of those discourses.

The following research questions are at the center of the project and are investigated based on questionnaire and linguistic landscaping data:

1. How do the main stakeholders of the tourist space, i.e., tourists and Norwegians, perceive discourse on cruise tourism in Norway?
2. Are the central themes of online tourism discourse relating to Hurtigruten and cruise tourism in Norway also present in offline discourses as exhibited in linguistic landscapes?

The Research group SOCIAL – Semiotics Of Communication In interActive Languaging