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CHAPTER 1
Integrative Essays
Fishmanian Sociolinguistics (1949 to the Present)
OFELIA GARCÍA AND HAROLD SCHIFFMAN with the assistance of Zeena Zakharia
They shall yield fruit even in old age; vigorous and fresh shall they be. Psalm 92, as quoted by J.A. Fishman in relation to Yiddish (1991b: 9)
Introduction
Before an intellectual prophet and leader
It has been humbling to reread the scholarly work of Joshua A. Fishman spanning the last 55 years. We both met Fishman after he had been established as the founding father of the Sociology of Language. We knew then that his work had been trailblazing, insightful, inspirational. Being in his presence as a teacher and a colleague was indeed a transforming experience, for he not only taught us well, but also included us in many scholarly enterprises. One of us (García) is frequently heard to exclaim, 'Everything I know, I learned in Fishman 101.' But it took this careful rereading of his work, both his early work as well as his recent work, to understand his prophetic vision, evident as early as 1949 when he published the prizewinning monograph, Bilingualism in a Yiddish School.
As Joshua A. Fishman turns 80 years old, we are inspired not only by his gift of intellectual prophesy manifested so early, but also by his extensive scholarly contribution. His fecund scholarship is attested in this volume by the bibliography of well over 1000 items that his wife and partner in the sociolinguistic enterprise, Gella Schweid Fishman, has been able to assemble. We can say about Joshua A. Fishman what the Psalmist in the epigraph of this article attested, for he continues to yield vigorous and fresh fruit even in old age. As we write, Fishman continues to publish – a total of five books, sixteen articles, and two reviews are currently in press. As we will see, Fishman's intellectual contributions are important, not only because they anticipate many future understandings, thus rendering his prophesy important, but also because they are broad-ranging, making him a true intellectual giant.
Fishman's work dedicates much attention to leaders who develop and mobilize positive ethnolinguistic consciousness. For example, Bilingualism in the Barrio studies the language consciousness and language loyalty of Puerto Rican intellectuals. And both in his first major research study, 'Language Loyalty in the United States' (1960–1965), as in its update, 'Language Resources in the United States' (1981–1985), the views of ethnic activists received special attention (see, for example, 'Ethnic Activists View the Ethnic Revival and its Language Consequences: An Interview Study of Three American Ethnolinguistic Minorities'). Fishman has also intensively studied the leadership role that Nathan Birnbaum held at the Tschernovits Language Conference on Yiddish (see, for example, Fishman, 1987).
This essay gives attention to the role of Joshua A. Fishman as a leader who has mobilized and energized younger scholars throughout the world to study language and behavior, especially as it relates to ethnolinguistic consciousness. Beyond anticipation and the size of his intellectual endeavor, Fishman has been, and continues to be, a leader in an intellectual field – one who has mobilized hundreds, if not thousands, of scholars, educators, language planners and government bureaucrats to study multilingualism and to act on its behalf, and especially on behalf of language minorities. At times Fishman has openly expressed his interest in having a leadership role. Writing about bilingual education, he states, '[I]t is my fond and fundamental hope to lead bilingual educators in the USA and elsewhere to consider themselves to be a single community of interest, each learning from the other and correcting each other's experimental and attitudinal limitations' [emphasis ours] (Fishman, 1976: viii). Fishman's scholarship is not only ideologically mobilized, but it is energizing for the rest of us who read him and study him.
Joshua A. Fishman's clear leadership role in the founding and development of the sociology of language is unquestionable and has been well established by various scholars. Fernando Penalosa (1981:4), for example, calls Fishman 'the leading figure in the development and characterization of the sociology of language as an identifiable discipline.' According to Glyn Williams (1992: 97), Fishman, 'more than anyone, has been responsible for the development of the sociology of language.' Wright (2004: 11) calls Fishman, 'a key figure in LPLP (Language Policy Language Planning) studies.' In a recent text on sociolinguistics, Florian Coulmas (2005: 158) describes Fishman as the scholar 'who more than anyone else laid the groundwork for the scientific investigation of language shift.' And Spolsky (2004:188) has lately said: 'The study of the efforts of linguistic minorities to preserve their languages is another field initiated by the creative scholarship of Joshua Fishman. Just as his work pioneered research into language maintenance and the spread of English, so he too inaugurated the field that he calls reversing language shift.' In Dell Hymes' foreword to Fishman's first text on the sociology of language, Hymes (1972: v) writes: 'In several major areas of the field [sociology of language] – language loyalty, language development, bilingualism – Professor Fishman has been a leader in research; at the same time, he has worked to build the field as a whole.'
But which field is it that Fishman has built? It is clear that the work of Joshua A. Fishman goes beyond the two disciplines that the term 'sociology of language' evokes. His intellectual enterprise is grounded in language in society, but also encompasses psychology, political science, anthropology, history, education, geography, religion and literature. The danger of continuing to refer to the field that Fishman has so richly developed as 'sociology of language' is that it reduces it only to sociological inquiry about language. We propose here, based on Fishman's own reclaiming of the term 'sociolinguistics' (see 'Growing pains' section below), that we speak of Fishmanian sociolinguistics, as a way to build a space for the rich interdisciplinary field that he has developed and in which language in society remains at the core.
This essay
Though we are unable to fully do justice to Joshua A. Fishman's intellectual genius, we nonetheless have found permission to do so in Fishman's own words, which we quote below. Speaking about the way in which research should and could be done and the way it is done in the real world, Fishman asks:
Why is there such a difference? Because researchers are limited in time, funds, ideas and ability; nevertheless, they must do the best they can with what they have. They cannot wait until the best of all possible worlds comes to pass (for it never will), so they try to conduct their studies as best they can. (Fishman, 1996a: 7)
We have tried to write this integrative essay 'as best we can,' knowing full well that it cannot represent or fully grasp Joshua A. Fishman's profound scholarship.
Because this volume includes Peltz's integrative essay about Joshua A. Fishman's work about Yiddish and in Yiddish, we omit the Yiddish category from our analysis. But we acknowledge from the outset the important role that Yiddish has had in Fishman's work. Fishman has always acknowledged the importance of what he calls 'listening to Yiddish with the third ear' in his work (1990: 114).
This integrative essay identifies some of the conceptual threads in Joshua A. Fishman's work over the last 50 years and attempts to analyze, in Fishman's (1971:607) own words, 'How the worm has turned!' The essay is organized along conceptual threads that appear interwoven, and even entangled, in Fishman's own work, often in relationship to each other. Although artificially separated here, we have chosen to disentangle them for the reader so that we might provide some guideposts as to how Fishman's thinking has remained the same, and yet has evolved. Sociology of Language, the interdisciplinary enterprise established and developed by Joshua A. Fishman himself, has evolved into what we might call today, because of its integrative and yet distinctive character – Fishmanian Sociolinguistics. Fishmanian Sociolinguistics subsumes the following categories of study:
• language and behavior;
• multilingualism;
• language maintenance/language shift/reversing language shift;
• language spread;
• language attitudes and language and ethnicity/nationalism/identity/ religion/power;
• language planning and language policy;
• bilingual education and minority language group education.
In drawing out the threads in this volume, we quote Joshua A. Fishman extensively. We do so because much of his early work has not been reprinted, and it remains out of reach for younger scholars. His words here provide the light to the guideposts that bring his ideas alive.
Language and Behavior and Fishmanian Sociolinguistics
The pioneering efforts
Trained as a social psychologist Joshua A. Fishman was strongly influenced during his high school years by the work of Max Weinreich and his son Uriel Weinreich on Yiddish Linguistics. Fishman's interest in language in different sociocultural settings was evident when, as a young professor of social psychology at The City College of New York, he used Joseph Bram's Language and Society as a required text. After a brief stay as Director of Research for the College Entrance Examination Board, Fishman returned to his native Philadelphia as Associate Professor of Human Relations and Psychology and Director of Research at the Albert M. Greenfield Center for Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught the first course in Sociology of Language during the 1958/59 academic year. In 1960, after receiving his first major grant for sociolinguistic research for his 'Language Resources Project,' Fishman returned to New York City as Professor of Psychology and Sociology at Yeshiva University, where he also served as Dean of the Ferkauf Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences. From 1966 to 1972 his Doctoral Program in Language and Behavior became the first interdisciplinary program at Ferkauf, later succeeded by the PhD Program in Bilingual Educational Developmental Psychology (1981 to 89).
Sociolinguistics has been said to have taken shape during the 1964 summer seminar at Indiana University's Bloomington campus, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation. This seminar, which took place within the general framework of the annual summer Linguistic Institute, brought together the major actors of what would be the sociolinguistic enterprise – Gumperz, Haugen, Labov, Bright, Ervin, Rubin and Grimshaw, among others. Although this marks the official beginnings of sociolinguistics for some, Fishman makes clear that by 1964, he had been teaching the sociology of language for five years; he had submitted his 'Language Loyalty in the United States' report to the United States Office of Education; and he was putting finishing touches on his first edited volume about the topic, Readings in the Sociology of Language, which was published four years later in 1968.
Definitions
A 1965 article entitled 'Who Speaks What Language to Whom and When?' established in a nutshell the question that sociology of language was to pursue for the next 40 years. In the first major publication to name the field, Readings in the Sociology of Language (1968), Fishman describes why the sociology of language is needed:
Since languages normally function in a social matrix and since societies depend heavily on language as a medium (if not as a symbol) of interaction, it is certainly appropriate to expect that their observable manifestations, language behavior and social behavior, will be appreciably related in many lawful ways. (Fishman, 1968: 6)
Fishman defines the sociology of language as an enterprise that:
[E]xamines the interaction between these two aspects of human behavior: the use of language and the social organization of behavior. Briefly put, the sociology of language focuses upon the entire gamut of topics related to the social organization of language behavior, including not only language usage per se, but also language attitudes and overt behaviors toward language and toward language users. (Fishman, 1972a: 1)
But the sociology of language is concerned with more than just language behavior. Sociology of language, Fishman (1991b: 2) says, 'is centrally concerned not only with societally patterned behavior through language but with societally patterned behavior toward language, whether positive or negative' [emphasis ours]. It is this belief in social action on behalf of language that spurs the shaping of the subfields of Language Maintenance, Reversing Language Shift, and Language Planning, which we treat later in the chapter.
From the beginning, Fishman talks about sociology of language as an interdisciplinary and future-oriented field. Sociology of language, Fishman (1968:6) says, needs 'work and workers with sensitivity and sympathy' and as such, is an inclusive, rather than an exclusive field. The sociology of language is (Fishman, 1968:5) 'one of several recent approaches to the study of the patterned co-variation of language and society' [emphasis ours].
Growing pains: Sociolinguistics vs. sociology of language. 'And never the twain shall meet?' (1972a: 278)
The term sociolinguistics was broadly used by Joshua A. Fishman during the early developmental phase of Fishmanian sociolinguistics. Publishing the very first textbook under the title Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction in 1970, Fishman used the term 'sociolinguistics' to include both behavior toward language (attitudes, movements, planning) and language concomitants of social processes, large and small (societal formation, societal interaction, societal change and dislocation). But Fishman constantly argued for balance and interpenetration between linguistics and sociology, and he pushed linguistics to truly include sociolinguistics:
If economics answers all questions with supply and demand, and psychology with it all depends, then the first contribution of sociolinguistics to linguistics is doubtlessly to make us aware of the fact that the relations and interpenetrations between language and society are 'a little more complicated than that,' whatever that may be. (Fishman, 1972a: 311)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Language Loyalty, Continuity and Change"
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Copyright © 2006 Ofelia García, Rakhmiel Peltz, Harold Schiffman, Gella Schweid Fishman and Joshua A. Fishman.
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