Volume 2017, Issue 243 - Special Issue: Rearticulating the past: the continuing influence of Joshua A. Fishman, Issue Editors: Katherine A. Masters and Sinfree Makoni

In personal tribute to Joshua A. Fishman, I tell a few stories about this remarkable scholar as I got to know him – a glimpse of the person behind the great ideas that have so powerfully shaped our thinking. My many vivid memories of things Fishman said or wrote in my personal encounters with him – often pithy one-liners – are testimony to the power of his mind and voice, his spirit and soul. From my first year of Ph.D. study when I took his course Sociology of Bilingual Education at the 1980 Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, through our interactions over the succeeding decades at conferences and talks, in personal visits and interviews, and around publications he invited me to write or vice versa, Fishman’s influence on my own academic career was enduring and profound. My turn to honor Professor Fishman for all he did for scholarship, globally, and for me, personally, came in the intergenerational symposium we organized for him at Penn in honor of his 80th birthday in 2006. My hope is that these personal stories begin to convey the intellectual giant Joshua A. Fishman was.

Academic biographies seldom go into details about motivation, but in the case of Joshua Fishman, we have his statement that much of his career was directed by the question posed to him by his father, “What did you do for Yiddish today?” Answering this question did not just lead to his personal decision to speak Yiddish with his wife and children, but also to make sure that his grandchildren would be fluent speakers. But as he explains, his pioneering academic work in the sociology of language had a similar purpose: to explore the nature of language maintenance and shift and to build a scientific basis to support language activists who wished, like him, to fight what seems to be the inevitable evolutionary forces leading to the endangerment and loss of minority languages. His scholarly work included many pioneering contributions to the study of Yiddish sociolinguistics, but it expanded to include not just other threatened languages but also to build a solid academic basis for studying what happens when stronger languages meet weaker. Thus he was the creator of the field of the sociology of language and provided support for language minority activists, all the time making sure he was doing something for Yiddish.

What does a scholar of endangered languages and the sociology of language write to his own people in their language? A review of Joshua (Shikl) Fishman’s column in the Yiddish quarterly Afn shvel from 1982–2002 reveals the repeated theme of urging his secular Yiddish readers to establish residential enclaves of young families who speak Yiddish with their children. He shared his knowledge of the language revitalization and standardization efforts of other groups, including ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, Frieslanders, Irish, Norwegians, and Welsh. These heartfelt pleas reflected his own bereavement following the decimation of the East European Yiddish heartland during the Holocaust and the disappearance of a vibrant Yiddish secular life in America. Nevertheless, Fishman applauded and supported the efforts of young people aimed at revitalizing Yiddish.

In much of his work on reversing language shift, Fishman cautioned those devoted to improving the sociolinguistic circumstances of regional, ethnic, and religious languages against a premature dependence on schools, especially schools controlled by speakers of the dominant societal language. He argued that efforts on behalf of minoritized languages that seek such recognition before intergenerational transmission has been established within the group frequently leads to intergroup conflict and to disillusionment. In this article, I draw from Fishman’s stated concern about the limitations of school effectiveness in connection with mother tongue transmission as put forth in his discussions of reversing language shift, but I problematize the notion of language maintenance and intergenerational transmission from the perspective of current theoretical shifts in the fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. I focus on the dilemmas facing the implementation and design of heritage language teaching and assessment programs given the various mechanisms involved in curricularizing language: that is, in the process of treating language as if were an ordinary academic subject.

Following Fishman’s (1998/1999. The new linguistic order. Foreign Policy 113. 26–40) seminal work “The new linguistic order”, this article first defines language ideology and order, then studies how they interact dialectically and how the conflicts and compromises between local language ideologies and global language order may have shaped colonization and postcolonial nation-state building in Asia. With colonial and postcolonial cases from Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia, this study sheds light on how the dialectical relationship between language ideology and language order is crucial to language policy and language management, but does not seem to receive full attention in theory and practice. Attention to this dialectic relationship also extends Fishman’s legacy of work on linguistic order by acknowledging unfolding globalization phenomena since the publication of his article seventeen years ago.

Taking Fishman’s concepts of macro- and micro-sociolinguistics, this article explores the relation between the sociology of language and sociolinguistics in the Brazilian context. We analyze the relation between both fields in American and Brazilian academic contexts and problematize Brazilian sociolinguistics’ bias towards the use of quantitative approaches. Sociological interpretation to Brazilian sociolinguistic analysis on race, class and nation is given in light of Fishman’s concerns on the sociology of language. We argue that sociolinguistic data production in Brazil, aiming at quantifying linguistic variation by using simplified social categories, ends up producing robust knowledge that is used politically to legitimate, in a postcolonial context, Brazilian Portuguese as being different from European Portuguese.

Drawing from Fishman’s ideas on language planning and multilingualism, the aim of this article is to explore isihlonipho sabafazi ‘women’s language of respect’, a variety of the Ndebele language spoken in Zimbabwe, as a minority language by analyzing the attitudes and ideologies directed at female isihlonipho speakers by not only male but also female legal experts in rape trials. In analyzing data consisting of interview transcripts with male and female attorneys on how they view and respond to isihlonipho in the courtroom, the focus is on the societal biases, ideologies, and attitudes towards isihlonipho use that are demonstrated. The findings suggest that language planning is an elitist enterprise that conceals inequalities and leads to injustice under the guise of law. Use of isihlonipho in the courtroom allows insight into how language planning is based on hegemonic discourses that permit discriminatory language practices. Given that speakers of isihlonipho do not adapt to the dominant language ideology, they then face dual marginality and are denied access to justice. This, in turn, raises important questions about power and ethics in language planning in that while language planning may address issues of multilingualism, at minimum it addresses diversity from without and not within.

Many of Fishman’s contributions to understanding language in society stress the importance of dynamics, drawing attention to the complex interplay of micro-, meso- and macro-level factors from which an integrated pattern emerges. Our understanding of language dynamics, therefore, should encompass processes unfolding at various levels and provide accounts that do justice to these interactions, while delivering an analysis broad enough to constitute a sensible basis for successful language policy. Such concerns, illustrated in particular by Fishman’s work on reversing language shift, call for revisiting this issue by focusing on the role of translation. Translation is linked to language dynamics, and it is both a conduit of language policies and a condition for their success, but these interconnections need to be explicitly acknowledged. Whereas translation studies often approach translation itself as a self-contained process, it certainly emerges from multilingual contexts, but is also, at least in part, dependent on language policies. Translation contributes to the maintenance of linguistic diversity and societal multilingualism which are, reciprocally, dependent upon the practice of translation. This examination confirms the ongoing soundness of the fundamentals of Fishman’s approach to “language-in-society” and helps to assess some recent criticism toward core notions of classical sociolinguistics that Fishman helped develop and disseminate, such as multilingualism, which is being called into question by current notions such as “English as a lingua franca” and “languaging”. The very existence of translation as a social, economic and political practice suggests that societal multilingualism cannot satisfactorily be described without resorting to classical sociolinguistic concepts like “named” languages, mother tongue and domain, which are crucial to successful policies and, hence, to the maintenance of the linguistic human rights to which Fishman’s work has made such essential contributions.

Translanguaged siding is the term used here for the relatively under-researched phenomenon of student-to-student communication occurring in parallel to the teacher-talk, but using language and other semiotic resources that differ from the teacher’s in order to shape understanding of the teacher’s meanings or to make other meanings. This article draws on Fishman’s reflections on his now famous 1965 question “Who speaks What language to Whom and When?”, and on Bakhtin’s work on dialogicity to examine the dynamics of semiotic choice in translanguaged siding as well as its functions in the experience of multilingual students at a South African University. Data obtained from recorded interviews, a questionnaire survey and documentary evidence allow for establishing that (1) there are complex chains of correlation involving subsets of identified siding variables, and (2) translanguaged siding can be supportive of learning, contrary to associations of siding with Malinowskian small talk.