A selection of Professor Fishman's writings, during the past two decades, on language and ethnicity in minority perspective, this volume concentrates on six major topics:

• What is ethnicity and how is it linked to language?

• Language maintenance and language shift in ethnocultural perspective

• The ethnic dimension in language planning

• Language and ethnicity in education: the bilingual minority focus

• Elites and rank-and-file: contrasts and contexts

• Ethnolinguistic homogeneity and heterogeneity: national and international causes and consequences.

Each major topic is prefaced by a specially written introduction, as is the volume as a whole, thereby integrating the material and focusing it on minority group concerns. Joshua Fishman's well-known dedication to worldwide cultural democracy and cultural pluralism, not only as moral imperatives but as empirical assets, shines through all of these selections and unifies them philosophically as well as scientifically.