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INTRODUCTION
Applied linguistics is an international, multilingual field concerned with issues pertaining to languages and literacies in the real world and with the people who learn, speak, write, process, translate, test, teach, use, and lose languages in myriad ways. It is also fundamentally concerned with transnationalism--the crossing of cultural, ideological, linguistic, and geopolitical borders and boundaries of all types but especially those of nation-states (Vertovec, 2004, 2009). Anthropologists Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton (1994) first defined transnationalism as the "process by which immigrants forge and sustain multistranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement" (p. 6). However, the situation can be much more complex and distributed than this kind of binary (origin-settlement) suggests, with multiple intervening (and subsequent) points of dwelling. Whereas studies might once have focused mainly on first-generation adult immigrants' transnationalism, there is now a growing emphasis on the mobility of children and youth as well; on virtual and psychological connectedness (and not just physical mobility and interactions); and on multigenerational experiences affecting languages, individuals, and communities in transnational spaces. These relationships may involve many types of social actors, resources, institutions and formal or informal networks (e.g., family, religious, business, political, educational, recreational, ideological).
In this article, I discuss recent applied linguistic investigations of the intersections and interdependence among language, identity, and transnationalism. I note common themes and directions for research in terms of the factors underlying transnationalism in the past and present. I then describe research on transnationalism and multilingualism in relation to family mobility; flexible citizenship; classroom language teaching and materials; and digitally mediated transnational, multilingual identities and lives. Although many of the examples to follow come from North American and Asia-Pacific contexts, research addressing this topic is being conducted in many other parts of the world as well, and especially in intensely diverse urban contexts sometimes referred to as global cities (Sassen, 1992). As Vertovec (2006) noted, "super-diversity" (his term) in postmodern Britain, for example, represents "a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade" (para. 1). There are also a multitude of sojourners (shorter-term, nonpermanent residents), study-abroad...