From
'Making Good Boundaries'
an interview with Joshua A. Fishman
by Xabier Erize, Planet 140

You have spoken to me about Yiddish, your own community, and you've also written about this often in your books, about the influence of being a Yiddish-speaker in your own professional career. Could you tell me a little more about that?

Yes. It goes back very deep in my personal history. I was raised in a family that consisted of language activists for Yiddish, and although my father was professionally a dental technician (he made dentures; my mother was the secretary, the bookkeeper), he actually ran an informal "ministry of culture" from his laboratory for Yiddish. He was on the phone all the time trying to arrange visits by writers and sales of their books, and theatre performances, and help to the schools, and financing summer camps, and children's theatres... So devotion to Yiddish was part of the natural growing up in that household. I told you yesterday that both my sister and I have had international recognition for doing things that are of importance to try to strengthen that culture which experienced three holocausts, one by the Nazis, one by the Communists, and one by Western democratic modernization which made it so easy, for people who were basically secular, to unite with the mainstream, because of their outlook on life - other than their language, their outlook on life was the same as that of the mainstream; they had no country of their own, nor cultural boundaries of their own. So they just melted away into the mainstream. It's very hard to do anything for a language that has one holocaust, but three holocausts - that's maybe just too much, particularly for modern, secular communities.
Anyway, my children speak Yiddish, and my grandchildren mostly speak Yiddish. One of my grandchildren went this summer, with his father, to Vilne [Vilnius], in Lithuania. It was a great Yiddish cultural capital before World War II. My son, who's an Eastern European Jewish historian, was participating in a summer programme there to teach young Eastern European Jews (and any non-Jews who were interested), to teach them Yiddish and about Yiddish culture, and this youngster went along with his father and sat in on the Yiddish courses. He was fifteen years old at the time. He knows Yiddish, he speaks to us only in Yiddish, and it was his first academic experience of listening to grammatical formulations and things of that nature. He is the fourth generation in this country, so maybe there will be a fourth generation that will try to do all that they can for Yiddish in the USA.

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What, in your opinion, are the major language-related issues in the world today, not in the research field, but in the real world?

I think that, at the same time as many, many languages are being weakened to the point of extinction, which is perhaps the most urgent problem in the real world, many other languages that could survive with a little bit of sympathetic attention are not being given that kind of attention because of the emphasis on larger languages in their environment.
I know you're concerned about Basque, but Basque is relatively well off; Basque is so well off that it can worry about esoteric things as far as the language is concerned. It can worry about whether Windows 98 will come out in Basque or not. That's a sign of a culture that is far into Westernization and may actually be cutting off the branch on which it's sitting. Because the jump from Windows 98 with Basque titles to yet other programmes without Basque titles is inevitable and once you've formulated the cultural goal of keeping up with the Joneses, of keeping up with the cutting edge of Western European styles and technology, you're really setting an impossible goal for yourself, and one which you can never win, as even French can't win it, even Spanish can't win. Basque will certainly never win it. It's the wrong goal. But nevertheless Basque's a lot stronger than thousands of languages that have not established any life pattern other than the traditional one. And therefore they're at the opposite end, they're making the opposite error of putting their trust in the spontaneous continuity of what's going on.