Word-formation in the Arabic Language of Tourism

The tourist flows between the Arabic-speaking world and the West have strengthened the need to develop several Arabic websites, brochures, guidebooks etc. in order to be closer to Arabic speaking visitors to Western countries. In the field of tourism, English has a predominant role and the Arabic language, through different strategies of word-formation, is reacting to Western influence by generating new lexicon that needs to be analyzed in depth. This article aims at examining the challenge tourism poses for the Arabic language: the creation of technical terminology encounters some difficulties such as recourse to different terms to refer to the same concept. Despite the lack of terminological standardization, the vitality of Arabic is evident in the efforts made to bridge communication gaps caused by different cultural contexts: for instance, semantic translation often seems necessary in order to make a foreign term understandable to Arabs. This contribution is the starting point of an indispensable deeper examination of the neologisms and the word-formation strategies in the field of tourist discourse.