Language Visibility and Community-Based Tourism: Linking Linguistic Landscape to Sustainable Livelihoods in Nigeria

Purpose — Rural tourism destinations in southeastern Nigeria lie at the crossroads of three unstable spaces the endangered native language (Igbo), a commodifying cultural heritage and the promise of livelihood that tourism offers to the locals, yet has not fulfilled. This paper investigates the interaction between language, culture and tourism and how they influence the livelihoods of the host community in Awgu Local Government Area (LGA), Enugu State, and the structural contexts within which community based tourism can be a pro-poor approach to development.Design/methodology/approach - A concurrent mixed-methods design was assumed in the framework of a pragmatist paradigm. The quantitative data were obtained based on a structured questionnaire filled out by 384 residents in seven host communities using a multistage sampling procedure that was based on Cochran (1977) formula whereas the qualitative data were obtained based on 18 semi-structured interviews with residents and 18 elders in the community, artisans, traditional rulers and tourism officials as well as photographic records of four tourism sites Descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis in SPSS v.28 analysed quantitative data; SPSS data were analysed with the help of a thematic analysis of qualitative data in the reflexive approach suggested by Braun and Clarke (2022). A synergistic analysis framework that incorporates the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (DFID, 1999), Linguistic Landscape Theory (Landry and Bourhis, 1997) and the theory of staged authenticity by Cohen (1988) informed the interpretation.Findings - Host communities are highly supportive of tourism development (86.2% acceptance); tourism has a statistically significant but small impact on perceived livelihood outcomes (β = 0.355, p < .05); but the linguistic and cultural resources capable of making Awgu stand out in an overcrowded ecotourism market are not well catalogued, unattributed, and largely invisible in the visible linguistic environment