Joshua A. Fishman was a great scholar. Few scholars in history have achieved so much, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Over an academic career spanning more than half a century, he published over a hundred books and a thousand articles on the sociology of language, a field he pioneered which touches on diverse topics including multilingualism, language planning, bilingual education, minority language rights, language revival, language loyalty, and much more.
Joshua A. Fishman was also a great Jewish scholar. For Fishman, his Yiddishkeit was not a minor biographical detail; he lived and breathed Yiddish and wrote an enormous body of work about it in Yiddish as well as in English.
Last but not least, Joshua A. Fishman was also a great Mouton scholar. Indeed, his history with Mouton goes back to before the publisher was acquired by De Gruyter. In fact, Mouton published the first two foundational texts of sociology of language, Readings in the Sociology of Language (1968) and Advances in the Sociology of Language (1972). In 1973 he established the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and in 1976 he established the book series Contributions to the Sociology of Language, both of which he continued to edit until his death in 2015. He also published numerous books and articles with Mouton. The Joshua A. Fishman Award is a small contribution of the publisher in honor of his legacy.
Uri Tadmor
Editorial Director, De Gruyter Mouton
Many of us have benefited from the wisdom that we have gained as students and colleagues of Joshua A. Fishman, and his generosity with all of us. This award will ensure that Joshua Fishman’s intellectual and human legacy is passed on to younger generations for years to come.
Our relationships with Joshua A. Fishman as students, colleagues and publisher in different corners of the world have been different. But Fishman’s generosity and humanity, in addition to his encyclopedic knowledge of language and society, have impacted all of us in similar ways. When Ofelia García walked into Prof. Fishman’s seminar on Language Maintenance and Shift at Yeshiva University in 1982, Mouton had published Fishman’s Language Loyalty in the United States 16 years before. When Florian Coulmas was invited to become the editor of the singles issue for IJSL in 1986, Fishman had been General Editor of The International Journal of the Sociology of Language for 15 years. Joshua Fishman kindly shared his deep understandings of sociolinguistics and his Jewish Yiddish-speaking life with an inexperienced US Latina student and a seasoned German scholar residing in Tokyo. He also entrusted his academic work to a publisher that was first Dutch, then German. The “loyalty” in the title of Joshua Fishman’s first Mouton book takes on added dimensions when we consider that he sustained our relationships throughout the many years that we were fortunate enough to work with him and learn from him. In establishing the Joshua A. Fishman Award, we entrust the future shaping of sociology of language to young scholars whose work continues to benefit from Fishman’s intellectual wisdom about language in society and his commitment to language minority communities all over the world. We are grateful to De Gruyter Mouton for the opportunity to continue to grow the work of sociology of language.
Ofelia García and Florian Coulmas
Editors, International Journal of the Sociology of Language
Joshua A. Fishman Award 2018
In collaboration with Joshua A. Fishman’s family, the editors of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (IJSL) and De Gruyter Mouton are happy to announce the establishment of the Joshua A. Fishman Award, intended to support scholars at the early stages of their careers working on various topics pertaining to the sociology of language. This award is meant to honor the outstanding scholar Joshua A. Fishman and his lifetime achievements and to foster innovative, high-quality research in sociology of language, the field that he so prominently shaped for many decades
De Gruyter Mouton will support this award with a cash prize of €3,000 for the best recent unpublished dissertation or first monograph on a topic pertaining to the sociology of language incorporating an interdisciplinary minority sociolinguistic perspective. Such topics include, among others, multilingualism and bilingualism, language and identity, language policy and planning, and bilingual education. The Joshua A. Fishman Award will be presented every two years at the Sociolinguistics Symposium. The submissions will be evaluated by a five-strong committee consisting of scholars (the editors of IJSL plus members of the IJSL editorial board). Winning manuscripts will be published in the Mouton book series Contributions to the Sociology of Language (CSL).
We kindly ask everyone interested in submitting his/her study to take note of the Rules and Regulations section published on the following pages (also available on the IJSL De Gruyter Mouton website), and we are looking forward to receiving and evaluating a large number of inspiring studies for the first Fishman Award of 2018. Deadline for submissions for the 2018 Fishman Award is September 30th, 2017.
Rules and Regulations
De Gruyter Mouton will support the award with a cash prize of €3,000.
De Gruyter Mouton will publish the award-winning manuscript after it has been revised into a publishable book manuscript upon acceptance by De Gruyter Mouton, at the sole discretion of De Gruyter Mouton.
The award winner will be announced prior to the Sociolinguistics Symposium.
An award ceremony will be organized at the 2018 Sociolinguistics Symposium.
The prize will be awarded for an outstanding unpublished study in the field of sociology of language.
The manuscript award program is open to scholars from any country at the early stages of their careers.
To be eligible, a dissertation must have been completed, successfully defended, and accepted no more than two years before the submission deadline. All other manuscripts must be unpublished first monographs. A dissertation must have been accepted as part of the requirement for a Ph.D. or comparable doctoral degree.
Submissions are accepted in English language only.
Manuscripts must be delivered electronically in PDF format (with embedded fonts where necessary) to the award committee at fishmanward@degruyter.com no later than September 30th, 2017. Submissions should include the following attachments: curriculum vitae, abstract, cover letter, and letter of support (if dissertation, from faculty advisor; if monograph, from a colleague who has read the work).
©2017 by De Gruyter Mouton