Joshua Fishman

Joshua Fishman was an American linguist and a founder of the sociology of language, a field studying the relationship between language and the social structures and institutions in which it is used. Fishman developed domain analysis, a framework describing how multilingual speakers systematically use different languages in different social settings, such as home, school, work or religion, and he extended the concept of diglossia, originally describing two varieties of one language in complementary social use, to cases involving entirely separate languages. In his 1991 book Reversing Language Shift, Fishman set out an influential staged framework, the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, for assessing how endangered a language's transmission is and what kinds of intervention could help restore intergenerational transmission to children, work that became widely used in language revitalization efforts worldwide. Fishman was also a major scholar of Yiddish sociolinguistics and language planning more broadly, and he taught for decades at Yeshiva University in New York.