LANGUAGE BARRIERS IN TOURISM: AN OVERVIEW OF GLOBAL LANDSCAPE THROUGH BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Traversing linguistic diversity around the globe, this study embarks on a bibliometric journey to unravel language barriers, spanning over four decades of research. This study systematically charts the discourse among scholars, revealing the development of themes, abundant research, and the complexities of cross-border collaboration using R Studio and VOSviewer. The study‘s findings indicate that the United States and the United Kingdom are crucial contributors and coordinators to the international network of scholarly interaction and its wake-up call for the developing world to focus on this phenomenon to promote the tourism industry. Using information from the Scopus database, the analysis charts research from 1980 to 2023, emphasising the growing importance of eradicating communicative barriers from travel experiences. The study indicates the need for empirical assessments of technology-mediated communication solutions and highlights a substantial gap in understanding language barriers in tourism. Keywords: Language Barriers, Tourism, Linguistics, Barrier-free Tourism, Bibliometric Analysis