This book provides a comprehensive and synoptic view of Joshua A. Fishman's contributions to sociolinguistics. Essays provide readers with the essential understandings of Fishmanian sociolinguistics and his contributions to Yiddish scholarship.It serves as a valuable summary of the sociology of language and the sociology of Yiddish.

Ofelia García is professor in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she is presently coordinator of the Bilingual Education program and co-director of the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies. García research interests are in the areas of sociology of language, language education policy, multilingualism and multilingual education, immigrant education, and teacher education for urban schools. She was a student of Joshua A. Fishman and has been his co-author and co-editor, most recently in The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City (Mouton).

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).