The son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Bessarabia. In 1988, he be- came professor emeritus and became affiliated with a number of other institutions: Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar, School of Education, Applied Linguistics and Department of Linguistics, Stanford University; Adjunct Professor of Multilingual and Multicultural Education, School of Education, New York University; Visiting Professor of Linguistics, City University of New York, Graduate Center. He has held visiting appointments and fellowships at over a dozen institutions around the world, including the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, CA) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ). Fishman wrote over 1000 articles and monographs on multilingualism, bilin- gual education and minority education, the sociology and history of the Yiddish lan- guage, language planning, reversing language shift, language revival, "language and nationalism", "language and religion", and "language and ethnicity". Fishman isthe founder and editor of the Contributions to the Sociology of Language book series by Mouton de Gruyter. Fishman devised theinfluential Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), used for determining whetherlanguages are endangered, in his book ReversingLanguage Shift. The Enhanced GIDS wasbased on this and is used by Ethnologue.