This short volume provides a comprehensive and synoptic view of Joshua A. Fishman's contributions to international sociolinguistics from 1949 to the present. Readers will find in this volume the essential understandings of Fishmanian sociolinguistics in two short essays that integrate his life's work. The first essay by García and Schiffman identifies the major theoretical contributions and the development of Fishmanian sociolinguistics, often echoing Fishman's own words. The essay by Peltz then analyzes Fishman´s contributions to Yiddish scholarship, as well as the role of that scholarship in his general work. These essential understandings are then extended through Fishman's own concluding sentiments, as well as by the comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography of over 1,000 titles of Joshua A. Fishman's work, compiled by his wife, Gella Schweid Fishman. Together, the contributions in this volume pay tribute to the life work of one of the world's most prolific and original scholars in the field of sociolinguistics -- the founder of what we refer to in this volume as Fishmanian sociolinguistics.
Ofelia García is Professor Emerita in the Ph.D. programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published widely in the areas of multilingualism and translanguaging, the education of bilingual students, sociolinguistics, and language education policy and practice. García has received Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Awards from the American Education Research Association (AERA) (Social Contexts in Education, 2019, and Bilingual Education, 2017); from the Modern Language Association (MLA), 2022; and from The Literacy Research Association (LRA), 2024. In 2023 she was elected into The Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023) and in 2018 into the National Academy of Education (2018). Her website: www.ofeliagarcia.org.
Rakhmiel Peltz is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Director of Judaic Studies at Drexel University. His specialization is the social history of Yiddish language and culture. He holds two doctorates, one in Biological Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania and the second in Yiddish Studies and Linguistics from Columbia University, and has published extensively in both fields. His book, From Immigrant to Ethic Culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia (Stanford University Press, 1998), is the first book on spoken Yiddish in America and provides a fresh look at ethnic culture in the contemporary USA. He is now studying the private culture of the pre-World War II Jewish family in Eastern Europe.
Harold Schiffman's research interests focus on the linguistics of the Dravidian languages,especially Tamil, and to a lesser extent, Kannada, and in the area of language policy. He has published in these two areas where overlapping interests in sociolinguistics (diglossia, language standardization, multilingualism) intersect with language policy and the politics of language. He is also director of the Consortium for Language Policy and Planning, and Pedagogical Materials Director of the newly constituted National South Asia Language Resource Center. Recent publications include Linguistic Culture and Language Policy (Routledge 1996) and A Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
