Tourism as polysemous discourse: how tourists make meaning of identity, language, and sustainability across urban destination cultures

This study re-examines tourism’s meaning by foregrounding tourists’ own voices across five culturally distinct national contexts anchored in major urban destinations: Egypt, Spain, Azerbaijan, the United States, and New Zealand. Drawing on 75 in-depth interviews analysed through reflexive thematic and linguistic-symbolic coding, findings reveal tourism as a polysemous discourse shaped by identity, language, and sustainability narratives, conceptually positioned against motivation theory, role typologies, and Social Representations Theory. Tourists defined themselves through symbolic role lexemes – ‘traveller’, ‘guest’, ‘pilgrim’ – while multilingual landscapes mediated authenticity and belonging, and sustainability perceptions ranged from trust in eco-certification to scepticism of greenwashing. Cross-case synthesis reveals three cultural constellations associated with hospitality traditions, individualist consumer ethics, and bicultural hybridity rather than economic development status. The study contributes to urban tourism research by integrating identity, language, and sustainability within a cross-cultural polysemous discourse framework, positioning tourists as semantic agents who actively construct meaning across city destinations. Implications offer pathways for authentic city branding, inclusive urban tourism policy, and culturally grounded sustainability communication in the management of tourism cities.