Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective

by Joshua A. Fishman

Overview

A selection of Professor Fishman's writings, during the past two decades, on language and ethnicity in minority perspective, this volume concentrates on six major topics:
• What is ethnicity and how is it linked to language?
• Language maintenance and language shift in ethnocultural perspective
• The ethnic dimension in language planning
• Language and ethnicity in education: the bilingual minority focus
• Elites and rank-and-file: contrasts and contexts
• Ethnolinguistic homogeneity and heterogeneity: national and international causes and consequences.
Each major topic is prefaced by a specially written introduction, as is the volume as a whole, thereby integrating the material and focusing it on minority group concerns. Joshua Fishman's well-known dedication to worldwide cultural democracy and cultural pluralism, not only as moral imperatives but as empirical assets, shines through all of these selections and unifies them philosophically as well as scientifically.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853590054
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	02/15/1989
Series:	Multilingual Matters , #45
Pages:	728
Product dimensions:	5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.45(d)

About the Author

Joshua A. Fishman is retired Emeritus Distinguished UniversityResearch Professor (Yeshiva Universityand Stanford University) and a frequent award recipient, lecturer, and publisher. He is also the co-founder of the field of sociolinguistics and founding editor of The International Journal of the Sociology of Language.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
SECTION l. WHAT IS ETHNICITY AND HOW IS IT LINKED TO LANGUAGE? PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND
SOCIO-HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS
1. Language, Ethnicity and Racism
2. Language and Ethnicity
3. 'Nothing New under the Sun': A Case Study of Alternatives in Language and Ethnocultural Identity
4. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays
Part I. The Nature of Nationalism
SECTION 2. LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND LANGUAGE SHIFT IN ETHNOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
5. Bilingualism and Biculturism as Individual and as Societal Phenomena
6. Language Maintenance and Ethnicity
7. The Societal Basis of the Intergenerational Continuity of Additional Languages
8. The Spread of English as a New Perspective for the Study of 'Language Maintenance and Language Shift'
SECTION 3. THE ETHNIC DIMENSION IN LANGUAGE PLANNING
9. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays
Part II. The Impact of Nationalism on Language and Language Planning
10. On the Peculiar Problems of Smaller National Languages
11. Modeling Rationales in Corpus Planning: Modernity and Tradition in Images of the Good Corpus
12. Language Spread and Language Policy for Endangered Languages
13. Language Policy in the United States: Past, Present and Future
SECTION 4. LANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY IN EDUCATION: THE BILINGUAL MINORITY FOCUS
14. The Sociology of Bilingual Education
15. Philosophies of Bilingual Education in Societal Perspective
16. Ethnic Community Mother Tongue School in the U.S.A.: Dynamics and Distributions
17. Minority Mother Tongues in Education
SECTION 5. ELITES AND RANK-AND-FILE: CONTRASTS AND CONTEXTS IN ETHNOLINGUISTIC BEHAVIOR AND ATTITUDES
18. Puerto Rican Intellectuals in New York: Some lntragroup and Intergroup Contrasts
19. Attracting a Following to High-Culture Functions for a Language of Everyday Life: The Role of the Tshernovits Language Conference in the 'Rise of Yiddish'
20. Ethnic Activists View the Ethnic Revival and its Language Consequences
21. Nathan Birnbaum's View of American Jewry
SECTION 6. ETHNOLINGUISTIC HOMOGENEITY AND HETEROGENEITY: WORLDWIDE CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES AND ASPIRATIONS
22. Whorfianism of the Third Kind: Ethnolinguistic Diversity as a Worldwide Societal Asset
23. Utilizing Societal Variables to Predict Whether Countries are Linguistically Homogeneous or Heterogeneous
24. Cross-Polity Perspective on the Importance of Linguistic Heterogeneity as a 'Contributory Factor' in Civil Strife
25. Toward Multilingualism as an International Desideratum in Government, Business and the Professions
26. Bias and Anti-Intellectualism: The Frenzied Fiction of 'English Only'
27. The Rise and Fall of the 'Ethnic Revival' in the U.S.A.
Taking Leave: Concluding Sentiments