Abstract
The concepts of tourism as “self-discovery”, “a special form of world-knowing” and as “functions of peace, interconnection and direct cognition and cooperation” are written on the skin of contemporary tourism, although these are lessons learned from the conference in 1979 “Slovenian in the public sphere”. Through participatory observation, linguistic analysis and discourse analysis, the paper presents the relationship to tourism and tourism communication over time and analyzes three aspects of tourism advertising discourse, namely authenticity, multilingualism and persuasiveness. The findings show that in Slovenia today we have a multifaceted, often contradictory attitude towards tourism. Tourism, on the one hand, is perceived as a driver of the entire social development, and on the other, it is still treated merely as a leisure and economic activity. Though, there are also examples of good practices that show that tourism activity is linked to self-discovery and networking at local, national and international levels.
