HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS, AND CONTEXTS

World history is replete with accounts of colonization, missionization, conquest, empire building, enslavement, and trafficking achieved in part through physical and symbolic contact among peoples with different cultures and languages and different amounts of power. Deterritorialization, displacement or death, denial of human rights, and the imposition of exogenous languages, cultures, and systems on local populations are also all too common in the historical—and contemporary—record. These trends, combined with natural disasters, disease, and economic hardships, on the one hand, and the desire for better, safer, and more prosperous futures elsewhere, on the other hand, have resulted in large swaths of affected populations living under others’ linguistic, cultural, and political regimes or under those they have willingly accepted as their own. The nations they once considered their homeland(s) may no longer exist or are now part of other nations as borders have been redrawn; people who have not moved physically may thus find themselves in a new country with a different identity and within a new ethnolinguistic ecology, separated from former neighbors and relatives who now inhabit the other side of the border. Their concerns—not just about surviving and thriving but also belonging—may be acute.

People also move, under sometimes precarious circumstances, in search of asylum or opportunity in other regions of the world. Along the journey and at their destination, they may be met by an assortment of new languages and ways of being positioned and assessed by government officials, local citizens and educators, language testers, or other diaspora community members. One such case study, presented by Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2010, chap. 6), is a detailed description of “Joseph,” a teenaged, (presumably) Rwandan asylum seeker in the United Kingdom with a very complicated and tumultuous personal history of mobility, deprivation, and multilingualism. Joseph's application for asylum was turned down (more than once) because his sociolinguistic profile—that is, his relative degree of proficiency in different languages spoken in Rwanda—did not conform to UK authorities’ assessments of his actual origins based on what Blommaert called his “polyglot repertoires” and usage; the authorities deemed these to be more Ugandan than Rwandan. For Joseph, the identity of legitimate asylum seeker (and UK/EU citizen—and Rwandan) was unattainable because his life experiences, multilingual practices, and (lack of) documentation did not conform to institutional expectations.

Mobility may lead to the retention of prior languages primarily or the expansion of linguistic repertoires by learning new languages or other varieties of the languages they already know. Alternatively, it can lead to language shift to new languages, and, possibly through that process, as one scenario, to cosmopolitan, multifaceted, and multilingual or syncretic (hybrid) identities. It can also lead to more assimilated identities within society. Migrants like Joseph, whose lives have frequently criss-crossed national and ethnolinguistic boundaries (even as such boundaries have been redrawn), particularly during turbulent times during which documentation of past residency or biographical data is lost, can find themselves as stateless and thus illegitimate multilingual transnationals, belonging nowhere.

AN APPLIED LINGUISTICS OF GLOBALIZATION, MULTILINGUALISM, TRANSNATIONALISM, AND IDENTITY

The personal histories, trajectories, aspirations, and mobility of transnationals have become central themes in identity research that focuses on immigrants, international sojourners, internal migrants in multiethnic or multilingual societies, asylum seekers, diaspora members, distance learners, and other mobile users of language (through face-to-face and digital contact) across increasingly porous geopolitical and ethnolinguistic borders and across spaces and places, both real and imagined. Discourses of the (relatively affluent) Global North and (less affluent) Global South, center vs. periphery, social class, race, and rights to citizenship (as in Joseph's case) also factor into the experiences and reception of the newcomers as well as longer-term, often second-generation residents in diaspora contexts, and how they are positioned and accommodated. These processes naturally affect identity issues such as who they are, who they are seen to be, and which languages they are able to use. Applied linguistics and sociolinguistics journals such as Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education; The International Migration Review; The International Multilingual Research Journal; The Journal of Language, Identity, and Education; and The Journal of Sociolinguistics examine current themes related to migration and (often) cultural and linguistic dislocation, or challenges in relation to social integration. Several recent special issues of other journals have dealt directly with transnationalism, multilingualism, and identity as well (e.g., Li, Reference Li2012), some of which are discussed in following sections.

Many applied linguists themselves began their careers through transnational (or translocal—involving mobility within multilingual or multiethnic countries) experiences at home or abroad. Their theoretical orientation to language learning and use, as well as identity, often reflects those experiences and histories. Like their students and research participants, they may have complex migratory and linguistic histories, often making discussions about where “home” (or “homeland”) is or what one's “home” or “native” language is, for example, far from straightforward and often contentious, in fact (Rumbaut, Reference Rumbaut, Levitt and Waters2002). These concepts are often connected with their own sense of identity and ascriptions of identity by others.Footnote ¹ In addition, the lives of relatives remaining “at home” may be profoundly changed by their ongoing contact with those living “away,” giving the former particular transnational sensibilities and identities (and related benefits, such as opportunities to receive remittances, travel, or participate in chain migration) as well.

With the growing focus on political, economic, and social dimensions of applied linguistics has come greater awareness of the global and translocal flows in modern society: of languages, (pop) cultures (e.g., hip hop, music, dance), symbol systems (e.g., logos, graffiti), knowledge(s), capital, people, education, ideas, and innovation (Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2010), as well as disease, criminality, pollution, and other negative elements. In Alim, Ibrahim, and Pennycook's (Reference Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook2009) volume, for example, the authors described how global and local languages (and dialects), identities, and artistic cultural practices are mixed and meshed in the creative production and performance by youth and young adults in various parts of the world. Language is a key means by which this identity work is done, illustrating performers’ appropriation and transformation of transnational or translocal cultural flows and ideologies as well as the indigenization of such practices (when the global is made local).

Also with respect to the role of language and identity in relation to global dance cultures, albeit a much more traditional one, Schneider (Reference Schneider2014) focused on salsa as a transnational and cosmopolitan practice associated with Spanish—and other languages—and with a certain “Latin” and gendered (“hyper-masculine” and “hyper-feminine”) identities (p. 41). Schneider identified communities of salsa practice in Frankfurt, Germany, and Sydney, Australia, to examine language ideologies relating global cultural practices to local enactments and ways of becoming, through Spanish and dance, another kind of self, or what she called an “‘other’ identity” (p. 60).

Various scholars now use the term translanguaging instead of code-switching or multilingualism to describe syncretic cultural and linguistic practices that characterize hip hop in particular but everyday conversation as well. Indeed, it can be difficult to discern boundaries between languages (and between dialects) used in such innovative, often artful practices, or in the identities indexed by creative combinations and permutations of language systems and the social worlds they reference (e.g., Blackledge & Creese, Reference Blackledge and Creese2010; García & Li, Reference García and Li2014). Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2010) connected translingual practices to what he called the “sociolinguistics of mobility” or “language-in-motion” with various linguistic and cultural resources (sometimes just “fragments”) deployed by language users at will. These forms may be used in a subversive, critical, playful, or simply very pragmatic manner. Syncretic language use is highly symbolic of the intersection of multilingualism, transnationalism, and identity.

Multilingualism and transnationalism are intimately tied to globalization, which affects policies related to citizenship, education, language assessment, and many other areas of 21st-century applied linguistics and society. As noted earlier, multilingualism and transnationalism are also tied to identity—that is, how people see or imagine themselves, how they relate to the social world, and how they are seen or positioned by others in their various social, cultural, and linguistic settings, and thus their sense of belonging to and legitimacy within particular social groups near and far (Block, Reference Block2007; Hornberger, Reference Hornberger2007; Norton, Reference Norton2013). Applied linguistics is increasingly interested in these phenomena because there are clear and necessary relationships between identity and educational practice, assessment, language policy, language choice, and everyday discursive practices. De Fina and Perrino (Reference De Fina and Perrino2013) tackled this theme in their special issue of Applied Linguistics on “Transnational Identities,” by including case studies that demonstrate problems with viewing speech communities and languages as homogeneous and distinct, conflating nation and language and portraying diaspora members as linguistically stable subjects essentially rooted either “here” or “there.”

Languages themselves—English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and hundreds of others—are typically transnational as well, not limited (normally) to use in just one geographical region or territory but used as lingua francas, national majority or minority languages, and colonial and diasporic heritage languages. Being a speaker of a language used in many parts of the world connects one, potentially, with those wider linguistic communities—at least in one's consciousness—and, although one's own variety of the language may be different, this shared linguistic foundation, repertoire, and history may give one a sense of connection or affiliation with those communities as well (e.g., Li & Zhu, Reference Li and Zhu2013). The concept of deterritorialization and decentering of languages, cultures, and peoples is related to this theme; ethnolinguistic groups, especially in diaspora contexts, do not simply or necessarily identify with one ancestral, idealized geographic and political space or place but, rather, may have multiple connections and ties, or what Vertovec (Reference Vertovec2009) referred to as “an awareness of multi-locality” (p. 6).

THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF TRANSNATIONALISM AND MULTILINGUALISM

Sociolinguistics and historical linguistics document the complex pathways and evolution of languages through migration, contact, and change on both larger time scales and in the micro-interactions among interlocutors on a smaller scale. Kramsch and Whiteside's (Reference Kramsch and Whiteside2008) study in a San Francisco Bay area community and He's (Reference He2013) research in Long Island, New York, demonstrate the agility, flexibility, and creativity of negotiation, construction, and what He calls “multi-performance” (indexing, or pointing to, among other things, multilingual diaspora identities, stances, and competencies) in interactions in multiethnic communities and multigenerational families. Kramsch and Whiteside demonstrated how even a single utterance or series of utterances, often involving a mixture of languages spoken among multilingual immigrants (particularly Maya speakers from Yucatan, Mexico, in their article), can index a particular aspect of transnational and ethnolinguistic identity and current space/place and relationship with local interlocutors. The chosen linguistic forms and codes provide traces to other social networks, physical locales, and varieties of language, some more prestigious than others, and thus accommodated to when necessary. As Kramsch and Whiteside observed in interactions among their Yucatec Maya participants and local (e.g., Vietnamese-, Chinese-, Spanish- and Maya-speaking) vendors or merchants,

Li and Zhu (Reference Li and Zhu2013) illustrated a similar phenomenon with a group of Chinese university students in the United Kingdom (from different generations of Chinese-UK transnational migration, different regions, and often different dialects and additional languages). The authors observed how flexibly and seamlessly the participants (friends) seemed to shift, by means of translanguaging, among the many different varieties of Chinese and English and other languages at their disposal. By translanguaging, W. Li and Zhu referred to current transdisciplinary perspectives on the creative processes by means of which interlocutors engage in “flexible and dynamic multilingual practices” (p. 519). This view, they claimed persuasively, can account for “the full range of linguistic performances of multilingual language users for purposes that transcend the combination of structures, the alternation between systems, the transmission of information, the contextualization of the message, and the representation of values, identities, and relationships.” (p. 519). Furthermore, they asserted that translanguaging “develops and transforms the speakers’ skills, knowledge, experience, attitudes, and beliefs; thus creating a new identity for the multilingual speaker” (p. 519).

In their examination of five male focal participants in their study, Li and Zhu (Reference Li and Zhu2013) noted creative moments in which the young men, in their routine interactions with the others in their social group, deployed language in humorous or otherwise marked ways (e.g., making inadvertent bilingual puns, attempts at others’ English accents, forms of double voicing), drawing commentary and often laughter from the others. Some of the repartee itself concerned the students’ identities and subject positions as transnational multilinguals in London—one salient aspect of their current, shared identities, albeit different for the British-born participant. Students’ quest for appropriate ways of representing their unique identities at the university also surfaced in their comments to the researchers. Excerpts from interviews with two of the students, Stephen and Chris, following observations of their translanguaging across varieties of Chinese and English, illustrate the issues connected with their linguistic repertoires, identities, and their past and present trajectories, including their current residence in, and identification with, London as well as other places in the Sinophone and Anglophone world. The excerpts also exemplify their understanding of the diversity represented by the term “Chinese” in that context, and notions of deterritorialization of people, cultures, and languages, such that linguistic practice or proficiency cannot be equated to a single essentialized source location (or “home”), even though others might impose such an identity on them as “China Chinese” (i.e., Chinese individuals from China). The politics of homeland and cultural/linguistic identity thus come into play in within-group linguistic practices as well as those with outsiders with less understanding of such nuances. Stephen, who was born in China but had spent years living in New Zealand and Singapore prior to moving to the United Kingdom, reflected on his own identity:

And later, in response to a question about his Chinese identity:

Chris, who was born in the United Kingdom, declared:

As in Kramsch and Whiteside's (Reference Kramsch and Whiteside2008) and He's (Reference He2013) studies, then, the students’ intersubjective language practices and ideologies, their translanguaging, and their identity construction and performance revealed what is likely a very common experience for many people who find themselves in a (loose) social network, even within a similar ethnolinguistic group, but with quite unique histories and repertoires and thus identities, subjectivities, and trajectories; yet they may be viewed by others in a relatively monocultural, stereotypical way (e.g., Maya- or Spanish-speaking immigrants; or Chinese university students in the United Kingdom assumed to be recently-arrived visa students from mainland China who are still learning English).

TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES, MULTILINGUALISM, AND IDENTITY

Research on transnational families in anthropology, sociology, and applied linguistics has grown considerably over the past decade, emphasizing many families’ complex, multisited lives and relations in different parts of the world in the 21st century (Goulbourne, Reynolds, Solomos & Zontini, Reference Goulbourne, Reynolds, Solomos and Zontini2010). With first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants proficient in the languages and cultures of their adoptive countries, more opportunities exist for return migration (either temporary or permanent) and for serial or circular immigration, and thus for the cultivation of more multifaceted identities as transnational or cosmopolitan multilinguals. The new family language policies in such transnational, multilingual families have become a fertile area of research as well, for example, in Chinese diaspora and transnational communities (Curdt-Christiansen, Reference Curdt-Christiansen2013; Li, Reference Li2012). Different members even in the same transnational family and within the same generation (though more pronounced across generations) will likely have quite unique perspectives and attachments to their local and more distant communities, networks, and languages. For each individual, these views and alignments change over time as well.

Farr (Reference Farr2006), a linguistic anthropologist, studied a transnational community known as Mexican rancheros, long established in the Chicago area. The rancheros represent a diverse social network of multigenerational families originally from the same village in rural western Mexico. Farr has studied the group ethnographically for more than two decades in Chicago and Mexico. The community, according to Farr, “lives on both sides of a nation-state border, and maintains social, economic, political, and emotional ties that extend across that border” (p. 5), yet their groups on each side are part of the same transnational community, regardless of where they reside. This joint membership and origin are also part of their identity within Mexico and the United States—as is their well-honed verbal performance (e.g., language play and joking; use of particular imperatives and respect forms) and their ways of using language more generally (e.g., speech styles), which mark their ranchero identities and transnational and multilingual ideologies in specific ways. Farr described the rancheros living in Chicago as living primarily within a “Mexican home front” (p. 24)—one that is very tied to their source region, which is also one they return to frequently, receive friends and relatives from, and may themselves retire to someday. In addition, the children may be schooled in both countries, with bilingual and biliterate profiles and ways of participating in classrooms that bear traces of their cultural experiences and their vernacular oral skills, as well as their struggles with literacy.

Transnational mobility (in different directions) for education, language maintenance, work, retirement, eldercare responsibilities, and maintenance of ties with relatives and others in one's social networks appears to be a growing phenomenon among families across ethnic groups and diaspora. This mobility is most attainable for those with the means, desire, and need to move across continents or jurisdictions at different stages of life. A growing body of research specifically on Chinese transnationalism, multilingualism, and related identity issues is found, for example, in Abdi (Reference Abdi2014), Curdt-Christiansen and Hancock (Reference Curdt-Christiansen and Hancock2014), Fong (Reference Fong2011), and Lam (Reference Lam2009a, Reference Lam2009b, Reference Lam2013, Reference Lam2014). Much of this research describes Chinese parents’ pursuit of better education for their children through other languages (i.e., English) in other regions of the world, which may precipitate a move from one schooling system and country to the next, with or without intact nuclear families. Furthermore, in the current neoliberal economy, they are being actively recruited by institutions abroad seeking international school-aged or postsecondary full-fee-paying students.

Within North America, this phenomenon has resulted in a whole new vocabulary, some of it pejorative, around these mobile students and their (ascribed) identities; for students from Asia, labels include satellite children, parachute children, astronaut families, anchor babies, and designer immigrants (see cases in Duff, Reference Duff2014); and in other areas (e.g., U.S. borderland regions), undocumented children, unaccompanied minors, and even illegal children (Wiley, Reference Wiley2013). Often these transnationals are viewed as one massive, undifferentiated category (or problem)—English language learners—obscuring tremendous differences in their backgrounds, resources, goals, abilities, and trajectories.

In Korean communities, Kim and Duff (Reference Kim and Duff2012) reported on how Korean Canadian young adults characterized as Generation 1.5 learners of English, having arrived in Canada during their earlier school years, vacillated throughout their Canadian secondary school and university years between their learning, maintenance, and use of Korean and English and between identification with Korean-speaking versus English-speaking groups and cultures. Their relative degree of investment in English vs. Korean was also associated with whether their parents, siblings, or friends had returned to Korea for work or study after some years in Canada, and whether they might do the same. This critical notion of reverse, circular, or serial migration is addressed further in the following section in relation to what is sometimes referred to as flexible citizenship.

Two related studies dealing with transnationalism among Korean children studying in Canada or the United States are those by Song (Reference Song2010) and Shin (Reference Shin2012). Song conducted a longitudinal, ethnographic case study of two young Korean boys engaged in early study-abroad and their families living temporarily in the United States. The families’ goal was to improve their children's English and thus educational prospects back in Korea as well as in the United States. Song described the cultural cachet (i.e., social capital: power and prestige back in their middle-class Korean milieus) attached to study-abroad sojourns for English language learning purposes from the perspective of affluent Koreans and also the competition among parents to showcase their own experiences abroad and thus their cosmopolitanism. Song described clear differences between the two mothers’ (and families’) approaches to maintenance and use of first language (L1) Korean in relation to the relentless emphasis on oral English mastery among their compatriots, and also how and why their perspectives and practices changed over the year of the study. One important factor was the families’ intentions to stay on in the United States or to return to Korea.

Shin (Reference Shin2012) studied older Korean students: teenaged visa students in Toronto. She examined how they positioned and styled themselves as cool, modern, and cosmopolitan—based on the perceived global (or at least pan-Asian) power and status of contemporary Korean popular and digital cultures especially. They contrasted their superior status with that of earlier waves of Korean immigrants to Canada of a lower social class, whose English was more developed but whose Korean did not include current vernacular (slang) forms; these old-timers (immigrants) were thus viewed as neither fashionable nor trendy and were decidedly “uncool” (p. 190) and “old-fashioned” (p. 191) from the perspective of the newcomers. The newer arrivals also distinguished themselves from non-Korean Canadians and local culture, both of which the Korean students considered to be patently retrograde in relation to Korean cosmopolitanism and their own popular culture practices (even though they might have desired greater access to and acceptance by these same peer groups). On the other hand, they themselves were positioned by others in their Canadian environment much less favorably, as newcomer “Asian nerds” (p. 189) with inferior English, for example. Prior to coming to Canada, two sisters in the study had lived in New Zealand for four years, where they had had a worse overall experience evidently, encountering various forms of racism from local students; however, they reported being admired by other Asian students because of their association with Korean pop culture. Thus their transnational trajectories in their pursuit of high-quality English-medium education were not simply marked by residence in Korea and Canada. Furthermore, their identities hinged on both their English abilities and also their proficiency in current Korean youth slang, code-mixing, and using certain Korean texting practices, namely, “a mixture of English, transliterated Korean, Korean Internet shorthand, and emoticons as stylistic resources to present their transnational identities” (p. 192).

International schools or schools run by foreign governments (e.g., Japanese-accredited schools, French international schools) are another means by which student mobility and transnationalism can be fostered relatively seamlessly. However, students’ identity positions may be complex, as they are immersed in the language and curriculum of another country from afar to which they are projected to be future returnees and whose education is therefore designed by foreign governments. Sometimes students find themselves studying alongside domestic students of the same heritage who have no particular investment in citizenship or residence in the sponsor nation, or they end up being longer-term sojourners or even permanent residents or citizens in the host country despite families’ earlier intentions to return and settle to Japan.

Doerr and Lee (Reference Doerr and Lee2013) examined one such Japanese language program at an institution in the U.S. Northeast serving dual purposes: (1) Japanese language arts education for Japanese transnational sojourners in the U.S. and (2) heritage language education for (mostly) U.S.-born learners of Japanese. Enrollment in one or the other track was not as segregated or clear-cut as might be expected, however. In some cases, particular students opted to change tracks, either to study among “native speakers” of Japanese or, conversely, to follow a less rigorous curriculum, favoring a range of participatory activities in the heritage-language track and a greater feeling of belonging to the local American community as opposed to being part of a “transpanted, virtual Japan” (p. 63). Students’ proficiency level in Japanese also factored into their choice of tracks. Heritage-language education itself is often fraught with the imposition and contestation of transnational (vs. local) identities and notions of citizenship, and expectations regarding desired levels and types of proficiency. Other points of contestation might include language ideologies (e.g., about the status of dialects vs. a national standard variety) and assumptions regarding learners’ personal (past and future) multilingual trajectories, and their ethnolinguistic identities and investments (Abdi, Reference Abdi2011; Blackledge & Creese, Reference Blackledge and Creese2010; Li & Duff, Reference Duff2014).

Most of the preceding studies are connected with families in possession of various forms of capital to leverage opportunities in other countries, and also the means to leave (or return) if dissatisfied. Such possibilities create very different mobile, transnational identities than those of many refugee populations,Footnote ² for instance, or migrants on lower rungs of the socioeconomic scale whose options and resources may be much more limited. For them, in the case of past civil war, for instance, transnational associations and identities associated with their former homelands and languages may be traumatic, tenuous, and politically risky.

This point was illustrated earlier with the example of Joseph, the asylum seeker in the United Kingdom and is relevant in a number of other ethnographic studies of multilingualism and identity in transnational families. Three such studies are reviewed here from a growing body of work. Sociolinguistic studies of transnational refugees in the United States (e.g., Warriner, Reference Warriner2007a, Reference Warriner2013) have examined, among other topics, particular practices involving standardized (multiple-choice) English literacy assessment and expedient worksheet-style instruction and the identity positions they impose on these multilingual newcomers (“empty vessels,” Reference Warriner2007a, p. 316) seeking access to functional English language/literacy proficiency and typically minimum-wage jobs as part of their resettlement process. The same practices, however, according to Warriner (Reference Warriner2007a), did not prepare the women in her study well for greater social mobility and opportunity, nor did they engage the women's out-of-school experiences, histories, and identities in meaningful ways.

In contrast, Duran's (Reference Duran2012) dissertation study of three Karenni refugee families (16 individuals) in Arizona documents precisely their out-of-school lives and language or literacy practices and needs within communities and social networks that were richly multilingual and multimodal. Originally from Myanmar, where they were displaced by ongoing political and ethnic strife, and therefore sought refuge in Thailand and later other countries, the Karenni in Duran's study were transnational multilinguals, proficient in a (translingual) mixture of Karenni, Thai, Burmese, English, and often additional minority languages, due to their migration histories and cross-cultural contact. Cell phones, video games, social media, texting, digital-photograph taking, Internet surfing, television, DVD movies and other (multilingual) resources mediated their communication and lives, together with the people in their social worlds, such as neighbors, the researcher herself, and others. However, with fewer resources and more constrained education than immigrants from other socioeconomic backgrounds, such as the transnational Korean communities described earlier, their identities as “struggling new immigrants and English language learners” (p. 61) were also apparent—and often mocked by their own children, who often imposed their own language policies within their homes. In terms of their future trajectories as transnationals, they had few apparent prospects for returning to Thailand or Myanmar at the time of the study.

A third study, by King (Reference King2013), examined language socialization within an Ecuadorian family in Minnesota, looking especially at different experiences of multilingualism (Spanish, English) and language shift among the three daughters, ages 1, 12, and 17. King explored each daughter's ways of being positioned by herself and others in relation to English and Spanish proficiency and ideologies around the acquisition, maintenance, and use of both languages. Given the parents’ and daughters’ different ages and immigration histories (two of the daughters having been born in the United States), there was considerable variation across the three girls in how they took up–and imposed on others–particular family language policies, practices, proficiency, and identities being cultivated, such as identification as good (“White,” Anglophone) American citizen vs. (racialized, Hispanophone) Ecuadorian. Resentments grew as a result, and their transnational ties to Ecuador, in terms of possible return migration, for example, were affected accordingly.

Religious institutions and networks are another prominent theme in some of the studies of transnational families. Their affiliations with and participation in transnational institutions connected with religious or faith-based social networks have been found to play another key role in their linguistic and cultural practices and social roles, identities, mobility, and settlement. Church participation in Ek's (Reference Ek2009) case study of a young Guatemalan woman's experience in Pentecostal churches in California and Guatemala specifically was instrumental in developing her L1 oral and literacy skills, even though different varieties were used among diverse diaspora members in the United States (e.g., from Central America). This proficiency and her transnational church ties facilitated trips between the United States, where she lived, and Guatemala, where she regularly attended church on her annual visits. The church therefore provided a conduit, distributed social network, and a meaningful sense of belonging and purpose for the woman both within and across national borders.

The role of faith-based communities and institutions in transnational migration, settlement, and multilingualism has been examined by other applied linguists as well (e.g., Kattan, Reference Kattan2010) and was also a factor in some of Duran's (Reference Duran2012) Karenni family members’ experiences. Han (e.g., Reference Han2011) studied sociolinguistic practices and ideologies in Chinese evangelical churches in Canada with a history of using either Cantonese or Mandarin primarily (and some English for the younger generation initially, and later for new, skilled immigrants from Mainland China who needed English practice for employment). The churches in this way responded to parishioners from different waves of migration historically, different political periods, and representing migrants from different regions of Greater China. But the leaders were also attempting to retool themselves to better meet their evangelical outreach mission by learning the language of the latest newcomers. That is, the historically Cantonese church was now offering programming in Mandarin so as to socialize the old-timers into the language of the newcomers to improve their collective evangelism prospects. Such practices not only served to bring newcomers into the fold but also provided a more direct and pragmatic form of outreach and support to a diverse and changing membership.

Participation in or affiliation with certain transnational religious and political ideologies, activities, and associated language, literacy, or semiotic practices in the post-9/11 era in some parts of the world can be interpreted in undesirable ways as well—for example, casting adherents as suspicious or disloyal citizens (e.g., Lam & Warriner, Reference Lam and Warriner2012). Such positionings may lead to harassment, discrimination, and surveillance. Brinkerhoff (Reference Brinkerhoff2009) discusses digital diasporas and the identities and transnational engagements of people who affiliate with (often multilingual) grassroots cybercommunities, such as MyCopticChurch, an Egyptian Coptic diaspora group, for a wide variety of reasons (e.g., political, international development and aid, economic, social, cultural, self-advancement, or in the service of knowledge transfer). She demonstrates how such cybercommunities can contribute to peace and prosperity, as opposed to conflict or destruction, and can also successfully support migrants’ hybrid identities and well-being as transnationals.

REVERSE AND CIRCULAR MIGRATION: FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP

Short-term, permanent, serial, or reverse migration is by no means a new phenomenon. However, new wealth, linguistic and cultural pluralism, the speed and ease of long-distance travel, and new information and communication technologies (the Internet, mobile phones, inexpensive calling cards) have accelerated processes that have long existed but that used to take much longer to achieve for those able to engage in them (referred to as “time-space compression” by Harvey, Reference Harvey1990).

International adoptions and transnational marriages have facilitated the migration of children or spouses to new homes and families in other countries, often involving languages other than those spoken widely in the migrants’ countries of origin (Fogle, Reference Fogle2012). The physical separation from their countries of origin may or may not lead to language shift, or the elimination of, or major shifts in their multilingual and transnational identities. Indeed, the receiving families may wish to cultivate these aspects of the newcomers’ language and heritage, although the newcomers themselves may reject such overtures (Duff, Reference Duff2014; Fogle, Reference Fogle2012). Ostensibly short-term, skilled or unskilled migrant worker programs have likewise permitted the movement of people (and often, later, their dependents) to new linguistic environments in which their labor may be valued, often much more than their linguistic, cultural, and national identities or desired immigration trajectories. Many have remained for generations in what were originally expected to be temporary sojourns without citizenship rights. Nevertheless, many maintain active patterns of return to those source countries or stay connected through remittances to relatives and other forms of communication and exchange. Furthermore, returnees often are accompanied by new family members, sometimes from other ethnic backgrounds, so the cultural flows are not simply of the same people returning to their points of origin (Goulbourne et al., Reference Goulbourne, Reynolds, Solomos and Zontini2010). That is, these places, and the languages spoken within them, may be home for some returnees but not others.

As mentioned earlier, changing economic conditions have influenced migration patterns, permitting those with ample cultural and economic capital the means to pursue lives in multiple locales and languages through various immigration avenues: for example, investment, skilled, entrepreneurial and educational. No longer is single or even dual citizenship the best way of characterizing these individuals’ lives; some scholars use the term flexible citizenship instead to describe postmodern and postnational considerations of citizenship and residency (Fong, Reference Fong2011; Ong, Reference Ong, Cheah and Robbins1998, Reference Ong1999). Flexible citizenship conjures up notions of flexible identities as well for those who may have homes, assets, close relatives, and associates in many countries either simultaneously or successively, and who may move among them as exigencies or new opportunities require or permit.

This mobility can lead to identities that might range from very fragmented to very fluid, temporal, and situated. The notions of polycentrism (e.g., multiple concurrent linguistic norms within a community), scales (Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2010; Canagarajah, Reference Canagarajah2013; Lam & Warriner, Reference Lam and Warriner2012; Lemke, Reference Lemke2000), and simultaneity (i.e., “living lives that incorporate daily activities, routines, and institutions located both in a destination country and transnationally,” according to Levitt & Glick Schiller, Reference Levitt and Glick Schiller2004, p. 1003; see also Warriner & Wyman, Reference Warriner and Wyman2013) are relevant here for understanding not only the horizontal temporal, spatial, and social scales or relationships navigated by contemporary multilinguals but also the hierarchical ones related to power and status. Although this flexibility and ability to negotiate varying scales and centers may be a sign of the times, this fluidity may not be well understood or appreciated by host communities accustomed to more enduring forms of engagement, investment, and presence in new immigrant communities.

Such appears to be the case, for example, with transnational children who receive some of their education in one country, then move to another, return to the first, or move elsewhere, as in Abdi's (Reference Abdi2014) study of Chinese Canadians’ transnationalism. Often higher quality education and bilingual development and maintenance motivate parents with children to move from one country to another. But this mobility and the deep-seated quest for fully developed bilingualism and bi- or multiculturalism may be construed by teachers, authorities, and other parents as highly disruptive for the children and irresponsible (or worse) on the part of transnational parents. Monolingual, racist, and assimilationist ideologies often exacerbate these institutional responses as do expectations based on more traditional models of immigration and permanent settlement.

Children or youth may also be sent back (or away) to extended families or kin in their country of origin due to concerns among their guardians about what they consider to be inappropriate behaviors or social networks, or their inadequate educational progress. Other factors might include association with gang members or other unsavory characters, undue identification with the new host culture's ways and dispositions (e.g., regarding gender and sexuality), from their parents’ or guardians’ perspectives, or the weakening or loss of connection with their heritage language, culture and relations (Ek, Reference Ek2009). Intergenerational cultural conflict and mismatched expectations then have an impact on the identity of the transnational youth within their extended families and peer groups and within society and the diaspora more generally.

TRANSNATIONAL AND DIGITAL LITERACIES, IDENTITIES, AND HABITUS

Studies of transnational literacy or multiliteracies have received considerable attention over the past decade as several recent review articles and special issues of journals attest (e.g., Lam & Warriner, Reference Lam and Warriner2012; Leander & de Haan, Reference Leander and de Haan2014; Warriner, Reference Warriner2007b; Warriner & Wyman, Reference Warriner and Wyman2013). Drawing on the New Literacies movement in the United Kingdom, as well as Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977, Reference Bourdieu, Raymond and Adamson1991) and other theoretical approaches, much of this work examines the social practices and identities associated with everyday literacies, particularly among migrants in the United States (e.g., Duran, Reference Duran2012). Lam and Warriner (Reference Lam and Warriner2012) discussed the often reported sense of “double belonging” or dual lives of many transnational citizens. In this regard, they wrote that a “transnational habitus is shaped or developed through people's experiences and social positioning in various institutional structures and fields of activity within and across nations, which may lead to different types of dualistic dispositions or comparative perspectives” (p. 195). In practice, however, more than double consciousness may be involved, as youth and adults navigate vernacular and peer cultures, practices, spaces, and identities, as well as those in mainstream local or distant nations they might affiliate with. This notion recalls the polycentrism and multilocality referred to earlier instead of dualisms (e.g., by Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2010), illustrated in the examples of Joseph, Stephen, and Chris and other cases described in this article.

With Skype, mobile phones, messaging tools, and online social networks such as Facebook and other websites, physical borders and distance do not pose the same degree of constraint over travel, return or reverse migration, communication, assembly, or movement that they did even a decade ago (Lam, Reference Lam, Duff and Hornberger2008). Digital technologies also provide the means and spaces for exploring and representing linguistic, cultural, and transnational identities and hybridity. They also provide mechanisms for forging a sense of belonging and affinity with others in similar diasporic, transnational, and multilingual situations. Lam (Reference Lam, Duff and Hornberger2008, Reference Lam2009a, Reference Lam2009b, Reference Lam2013, Reference Lam2014) has conducted a number of intriguing case studies of transnational digital literacies that allow bilingual Asian American youth, in particular, to navigate the borders that normally divide their lives artificially into here (United States) and there (e.g., Greater China or, more specifically, cities such as Shanghai), or distinct languages (English or Mandarin). Participants’ online practices, tools, and spaces, and their relationships with like-minded others in those same spaces, allow them to construct new communities, forms of knowledge, and often playful, syncretic or blended multilingual textual practices in much the same way that the participants in Kramsch and Whiteside (Reference Kramsch and Whiteside2008), He (Reference He2013), and W. Li and Zhu (Reference Li and Zhu2013) did orally in face-to-face communication, and which Yi (Reference Yi2009) documented among Korean American teens online. For the online users and learners of language and literacy that Lam described, these same practices contribute to the development and maintenance of their first language literacies, as well as additional ones (including not just English or, say, Mandarin but also vernacular written dialects, such as Shanghainese, and other symbols popular in text messages). What is more, through their engagement with affinity groups online, the students often had opportunities to collaboratively develop specialized linguistic registers, vocabulary, and rhetorical moves (e.g., stance-taking) related specifically to topics of mutual interest, ranging from philosophy to anime and manga (Lam, Reference Lam2009a). Some of that expertise was sourced from their countries of origin.

Noguerón-Liu (Reference Noguerón-Liu2013) provided a concrete example of how computer-mediated access to and use of the Internet, combined with the provision of support to make such access meaningful, contributed to adult Spanish-speaking American immigrants’ fuller participation in local and transnational social networks, relationships, and learning. The three focal participants (a man from Mexico and a married couple from Cuba), all university-educated in their countries of origin with limited prior computer literacy, took part in a university web-design course in Arizona through a binational U.S.-Mexican university initiative. They benefited from technical expertise from Mexico (one participant's brother and Spanish-language university support) and from their ongoing engagements with relatives afar, to whom they sent email, photos, and other messages and resources using their new skills, and from whom they also received various kinds of learning assistance. They also received support from their face-to-face interactions with local tutors. Their participation contributed, to different degrees, to their bilingual (digital) literacy socialization and civic engagement in the United States, although more obviously so for the Cuban American couple who had arrived more recently and had strong professional backgrounds (in law and medicine). These new forms of digitally mediated learning and participation no doubt had a profound impact on the three individuals’ identities and sense of transnational or local belonging and participation as well, though that was not the central focus of the analysis.

CLASSROOM LANGUAGE TEACHING, TEXTBOOKS, AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES

Education—and foreign language education in particular—often constructs and reproduces idealizations of one's own and others’ countries and regions and intercultural spaces. Language textbooks and instructional multimedia materials and methods create not just a window onto other cultures but the opportunity for imagined transnationalism, that is, the chance to imagine interacting and engaging in another language with people in other places (Curdt-Christiansen & Weninger, in press). Sometimes, however, such interactions are restricted to caricatured textbook lessons set in train stations, cafes, and iconic touristic sites. The language learner or user becomes a tourist (consumer) seeking services and access to cultural experiences and sites without deeper reflection. Kramsch and Vinall (in press) referred to this as the “cultural politics of language textbooks in the era of globalization” (which is also the title of their chapter) in an age of what Block (Reference Block and Coupland2010, p. 297) referred to as “global consumer citizenship” (as cited in Kramsch & Vinall, Reference Kramsch, Vinall, Curdt-Christiansen and Weningerin press); they suggested, instead, a deeper engagement with understanding oneself and others in terms of histories, subjectivities (or identities), and aspirations in such transnational, multilingual pursuits.

Language learners are normally expected to align themselves with the languages, values, and imagined activities and places in instructional materials in order to ultimately internalize the words—and worlds—contained therein. This is the case whether the learners have left home or not. Indeed, these transnational, multilingual, and imagined identities (Norton, Reference Norton2013) and worlds are often what keep learners or users of a language engaged in language practice even when they are not actually required to do so (for work or formal education). They may study simply as a social or leisure activity, possibly with the desire of achieving the bilingual proficiency of others they emulate in their society (Kubota, Reference Kubota2011). The local context may be juxtaposed with a distant social, cultural, and geographical place in which that language is used and with which the learner or user feels psychologically connected, akin to the romanticized desire (akogare, in Japanese) for the exotic other, an influential construct in Kubota's study.

The point here is that language education contributes to a particular form of transnationalism and learner identity where people “move” or “travel”—through their imagination, if not physically—using instructional materials and other media, and try to approximate transnational language exchanges and exploration; in practice, such exploration is more often than not with their co-national teacher and peers within the confines of a classroom. Yet some students (and teachers) may identify strongly with the target language or community and take on new linguistic or cultural identities accordingly. The practice of hiring native speakers of the target language, with or without appropriate training, is another means by which an authentic transnational and intercultural experience may be promoted by educational programs; study abroad is another.

TRANSNATIONAL TALK AND IDENTITIES: THE COMMODIFICATION OF STANDARDIZED LANGUAGE

Second language education, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, aimed to provide learners with the skills required to travel to or settle in other countries and speak the languages of the mainstream. As noted earlier, contemporary learners and users of language may have many other goals that do not involve travel and intercultural exchange in the traditional sense, but rather in a more metaphorical sense. Large multinational companies, for example, often impose a common language of communication such as English, which may not be the language of the employees, their clients, or coworkers, or the country in which they are working, but which positions those who speak that shared language in a particular way, such as cosmopolitan or business lingua franca users.

Research has documented the need for standardization among language practices and varieties (lexical, pragmatic, phonological, syntactic), especially when talk itself becomes a commodity, such as in call centers, both those in-country (e.g., in the United Kingdom for British firms) and those outsourced from Europe or North America to other countries, such as India or the Philippines.

In call centers, employees are usually expected to give the impression, through prescribed and heavily coached and scripted identities and linguistic or discursive practices, that they are local and share the same pragmatic norms of politeness, for instance, as those in the dominant culture of their addressees, or at least an internationally prestigious variety. Such transnational practices offer interesting research prospects for the analysis of transnationalism, multilingualism, and identity work through contemporary sociolinguistic engineering (Forey & Lockwood, Reference Forey and Lockwood2010; King, Reference King2009; Pal & Buzzanell, Reference Pal and Buzzanell2008). Workers in international call centers may take on new or expanded identities according to the social norms cultivated, often in the case of the Philippines or India, working together with young, liberal-minded university graduates earning more money than in other sectors, and working in what can be a relatively modern environment with shifts according to the time zones of their client groups and interlocutors around the world. The kinds and choice of language they are expected to speak (e.g., to establish rapport and mutual understanding, to express courtesy, and to manage discontent) and other aspects of style expected in such service encounters are also carefully policed.Footnote ³ Typically, the language (or variety) used is not the call agents’ first language, yet they must mask this fact as it might undermine callers’ confidence in their ability to solve local problems from afar. Therefore, transnational multilingual practices and identities are cultivated and enacted, often with considerable effort and with high stakes for the workers and companies (not to mention their clients), in many different sites, and with new information and communication technologies playing a major mediating role.