Learn English – Do native English speakers use the word “touristic”

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A word usage that always annoys me and feels like Euroenglish to me is "touristic".

I don't believe I've ever seen it printed or heard it used by a native English speaker and I've travelled in most of the English speaking countries and work in tourism.

But it's very very common to hear "touristic" from Europeans who speak very good English. Also at least on the web if not in printed media which I'm less aware of.

To me as an Australian the word to use is "touristy". It does sound more colloquial when I compare the two but it is used by all levels of society. Interestingly my web browser is marking "touristic" as wrong and accepting "touristy".

I have checked in dictionaries and both words are listed but they don't break down historic or demographic usage.

So is "touristic" Euroenglish or plain old normal English? Is it more or less formal / more or less artificial than "touristy"? Could it even be that they're not quite synonyms?

(Example usage from travel.SE: "During summer touristic places are open everywhere")

Since this has seemed to be a little controversial so far I did some Googling and found:

  • A thread on this topic on a site called Word Reference
  • Google Ngrams shows results for the English spelling "touristic" under three foreign European languages besides English but shows results for "touristy" only for English.

Best Answer

As a Dutchman, I have noticed the discrepancy between the English word and most Continental words. I believe the problem lies in the fact that we have a single all-round, neutral adjective on the Continent—at least your closest neighbours do: Holland, Belgium, France—, while you must make do with tourist or touristy.

Een toeristische attractie (Du.) — a tourist attraction.

This sounds perfectly fine in Dutch; in English the noun tourist, while acceptable, is forced to do the work.

Een toeristische route (Du.) — a tourist route? a touristy route?

Perhaps you will disagree, but neither English word sounds nearly as appropriate as the Dutch adjective; tourist route, arguably the better of the pair, somehow has a hint of modern marketese, while Dutch toeristische route is more neutral.

Moreover, Dutch and French are less ready to use nouns as adjectives, which makes using tourist even less attractive for us than it is for the English. For that reason, we crave a neutral word referring to sight-seeing but not evoking the image of concrete tourists. It is very hard to pin-point the difference in connotation.

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