Language and Travel: Spanish Vocabulary in British Travel Books

de la Rosa The aim of this paper is to offer an interdisciplinary approach to the study of travel writing.1 In particular, what we attempt to do is to apply a sociolinguistic point of view to a number of travel texts, which, undoubtedly, situate the traveller—and, consequently, the reader—in the fascinating context of intercultural exchange. As Henrı́quez (1995, p. 33) notes, in their work travel writers ‘try to re-shape the cultural exchange between... races and traditions’. Since culture and language are so closely intertwined, travel accounts could be used as a source to examine the cultural and linguistic influences experienced by writers as a result of their daily contact with the members of the communities they visit. Language in Literature When dealing with the signification of representing language or dialect in writing,2 Toolan (1992, p. 31) underlines the fact that there is ‘a deep division of opinion in literary studies between... the realist and symbolist viewpoints’. The former considers literature to be ‘related to the rest of life and discourse’; and the latter, sees it ‘as more metaphorically related’, or at any rate, as a sort of non-serious discourse, ‘governed by aesthetic considerations ’ which must take the literary text ‘as being far from a faithful record of actual speech’. However, we agree with Fowler when he says: Literature is language to be theorized just like any other discourse; it makes no sense to degrade the language to a mere medium, since the meanings, themes, larger structures of a text, literary or not, are uniquely constructed by the text in its interrelation with social and other contexts. (1988, p. 83