Fishman Joshua A. Handbook of Language & Ethnic Identity

Oxford University Press, 1999. — xii, 468 pages. — ISBN: 0-19-512428-6.The literature on ethnicity is already huge and is constantly being added to. It is also international and, therefore, multilingual, large parts of it being regrettably inaccessible to readers who depend on English (or any other single
language) for their familiarity with this topic. Finally, it is interdisciplinary and, therefore, highly diversified as to its underlying theories and assumptions. It is the goal of this handbook to bring to the nonspecialized reader a substantial selection that reflects the above-mentioned regional and disciplinary variations in views toward and experiences with ethnicity.The differences between regions and disciplines begin with the very definitions of the terms ethnicity and [ethnic] identity, extending to all the ramifications of these terms for the social, psychological, economic, political, and cultural interactions within and between groups of human beings. Although this virtually built-in variety of views and experiences cannot help but influence individual researchers and observers of ethnicity, such influences are rarely taken into account in any systematic manner when either local case studies or comparative and theoretical inquiries are undertaken or reported. The overall effect of this volume selections brought to their readers will be to foster greater awareness of some of the overlooked sources of disagreement (and also of concurrence) that have characterized thinking with respect to this topic for so many, many decades. The variety of views within Western European thought itself and between Eastern and Western European views, European and non-European views, humanistic and social science views, theoretical and applied perspectives, are all sampled in this volume and, therefore, can be subjected to comparative analysis.Discipline & Topic Perspectives
Economics
Linguistic and Ethnographic Fieldwork
Education of Minorities
History
Nationalism
Political Science
Psychology
Sign Language and the Deaf Community
Social Psychology
Sociolinguistics
Sociology
Second-Language Learning
Region & Language Perspectives
Americas
Amerindians
African American Vernacular English
Latin America
The United States and Canada
Europe
The Celtic World
Germany
Scandinavia
The Slavic World
Western Europe
Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Afro-Asian Rural Border Areas
The Arab World (Maghreb and Near East)
Asia & the Pacific
The Far East
The Pacific
South and Southeast Asia
Concluding Comments