Joshua Fishman  1926 -2015 

Joshua Aaron Fishman is one of the most influential figures in American and world sociolinguistics of the second half of the 20th and of the 21st century. He is the founder of the sociology of language as a separate field of research. As one of the founding figures of sociolinguistics, he has made a substantial contribution as a thinker, editor, and theorist. He influenced several main fields of inquiry: language planning, language revitalization and maintenance, bilingualism and multilingualism, small languages and globalization. Among his 85 books, many monographs, and hundreds of articles and chapters are seminal works on language and ethnicity, language and religion, bilingual education, sociology of Jewish languages, Yiddish, medical anthropology, and test construction.


Aronin, Larissa (2013). Joshua Fishman. In Carol A. Chapelle (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (pp. 2114-2120). Wiley-Blackwell.
Keywords: endangered languages; language maintenance; language planning; language policy; language revitalization; heritage languages

Singleton, David, Fishman, Joshua A., Aronin, Larissa, and O Laoire, Muiris (eds.). (2013). Current Multilingualism: A New Linguistic Dispensation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

 Fishman, Joshua (2013)  Language planning for a decimated and often forgotten non-territorial tongue. In Singleton, D., Fishman, Joshua A., Aronin, L., and O Laoire, M. (eds.). (2013). Current Multilingualism: A New Linguistic Dispensation. (pp.273 -278) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter