Despite serving as a popular keyword for academic research and popular discourse in the twenty-first century, transnationalism has been undertheorized from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, often interchangeably used with terms such as globalization, mobility, or superdiversity. Yet, the rapidly changing world calls for a more rigorous theorization of the concept, as cross-border flow of people, ideas, and capital interact in increasingly complex and politicized ways with powerful regimes of national difference. In Language and Transnationalism, Brook Bolander and Joseph Sung-Yul Park have gathered a wide range of established and emerging scholars working across diverse social and cultural contexts to consider transnationalism as a theoretical, analytical, and methodological perspective informed by the broader field of sociolinguistics. Reconceptualizing transnationalism as subjective, material, and ideological engagement with tensions of national borders, this volume seeks to recenter language and transnationalism as an ever-relevant area of study for understanding our modern world, particularly in times of resurgent reactionary nationalism. Further, it draws attention to the crucial role of language in constructing relations of sameness and difference and argues that language should be considered an essential mediating element for all transnational processes. Offering a practice-based perspective that looks at transnationalism in relation to the material, political, ideological conditions that constitute national borders, the book highlights the contributions that sociolinguistics can make for the vast interdisciplinary field of transnationalism studies.
