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Here we have translated the German text of a (1905) lecture of Nathan Birnbaum's that has been almost completely overlooked by researchers of modern Jewish movements generally, and particularly in the study of the Czernowitz Conference. This lecture was itself given at Czernowitz and ends with a call for "linguistic and literary conferences" on behalf of Yiddish and the elevation of the public status of the language. The lecture was given in German not only because the intellectual Jewish society Zephirah conducted its business in German, as was still (and long remained) the custom among the majority of the Czernowitz intelligentsia, but also both because Birnbaum himself had at that time never spoken Yiddish before an audience and because some of the individuals who had invited him to Czernowitz had been pupils of his in the previous decade when they were studying in Vienna, and so his relationship with them had already been established in German. Birnbaum guides his audience through all the Jewish problems of the time (Zionism, emigration, assimilation, cultural autonomy, the revival of Hebrew), until he comes, finally, to the problem and promise of Yiddish. Ten years later he would be in his Orthodox phase, which is faintly perceptible in this lecture, where both his earlier break with Zionism (1898/1899) and the autonomist, Diaspora-nationalist phase in which he found himself in the first decade of the 20th century are clearly evident. Although the entire lecture is quite clearly a Diaspora- nationalist manifesto, it is also especially important for the study of the Czernowitz Conference, because the lecture concludes with a number of the points that three years later Birnbaum would develop into the agenda of the conference there. This lecture clearly shows us the extent to which Birnbaum was the chief instigator of and driving force behind the conference. On Birnbaum as a language planner (and also as a national planner, always full of plans to strengthen, rebuild and deepen the Jewish people culturally) see Fishman (1987a). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses sociolinguist Joshua A. Fishman's theory of Cultural Autonomy (CA) as the issue's theme and recapitulates the understanding of CA as elaborated in articles published elsewhere in the issue. Topics include how Fishman's research helped reconcile positivist and postmodernist traditions within sociolinguistics, how CA always involves linguistic rights, and how political deprivation can generate linguistic dispossession. Additional information is presented on globalization and linguistic minorities.

In this focus article, Fishman argues that issues of power are (and have been) at the center of the sociolinguistic enterprise, and advances a theory of Cultural Autonomy that is crucial for sociolinguistic power-sharing. He discusses the promotion, protection or the abrogation of language rights of three kinds — (1) the right to linguistic pluralism, (2) national linguistic rights of the territorial kind and (3) the right to individual or personal linguistic recognition — and discusses the tensions among them. Fishman develops a Cultural Autonomy Rating Scale by identifying four factors — group vs. individual focus; power vs. powerlessness; unification vs. separation; and majority vs. minority designation. He advances that, at least in the liberal democracies of Europe, significant progress has been made, and points to the importance of international organizations. These efforts are then contrasted to how the US has dealt with Puerto Rico and the Navajo Nation. At the same time, Fishman points to some of the enduring difficulties and paradoxes that make states unaccountable to linguistic and cultural groups. Finally, Fishman draws attention to the centrality of language to identity and culture and argues that the importance of language cannot be sidestepped in any discussions about Cultural Autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on the Tshernovits Conference of 1908. The author looks at the keynote address on the 100th anniversary of the event. He considers whether it is possible to evaluate the success of a "first language conference." It is noted that the main languages of the first conference were Yiddish and Hebrew.

There are several advantages to reconceptualizing Heinz Kloss's dichotomy “ Ausbau vs. Abstand” as separate continuous variables, only the former of which ( Ausbau) is needed for corpus planning studies. Such a reconceptualization would not only be preferable from the point of view of measuring the connectedness between degree of Ausbauization and various population attitudes and academy implementation successes, but also to furthering continuous variable measurement in general sociolinguistics and to appreciating the co-presence possibilities of various other measures of corpus planning efforts that have most recently been introduced. One of the greatest gifts of Heinz Kloss to macro-sociolinguistics was the formulation of a polar opposite distinction between any two contrasted languages or varieties such that they are each either (a) easily recognized (i.e., judged) to be functionally independent from one another due to the major and natural (that is, not man-made) differences have already transpired between them, referred to as being “independent by Abstand,” on the one hand, or (b) those whose functional independence is recognized only as a result of the human effort that has been expended in order to make them appear sufficiently different from one another, so that the smaller and weaker of the two can be recognized as independent from the larger and stronger one and, therefore, referred to as being “independent by Ausbau.” Thus, the major theoretical contribution of Kloss, initially made well before his Nazi days (see Hutton 1999) was essentially a tripartite one, one which was simultaneously (1) judgmental and perspectival, (2) focused upon the importance of organized human intervention into the natural language-change processes in order that prestige- and power-related societal functions for, as well as the independence of, the contextually weaker variety were to have a chance of being recognized at all, and (3) preoccupied with “dialect avoidance efforts” more generally as a major desideratum governing intervarietal comparisons in the realm of social power. The above-mentioned tripartite considerations may be highly interrelated but they are, nevertheless, sufficiently independent from one another to also be considered separately, rather than necessarily only jointly. Finally, Ausbau and Abstand, rather than being totally separate, are also independently related to various yet other language planning dimensions and it is these last-mentioned relationships that actually disclose the major importance of Ausbau to the entire language planning venture in various polities (Schiffman 1996; Kalogjera 1985). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's opinion on diglossia and societal multilingualism. The spread of English during the past twentieth century may also have shown examples of the former type of diglossia genesis and even more varieties may become evident as English also continues to spread into areas of prior literacy. Thus, it its not etiology but time depth and the dynamics and course of social change that enable us to locate cases of diglossia stabilization, destabilization and restabilization, both of High and Low. Diglossia is, therefore, a fighting term in real life. The total array of status planning that goes into planning, unplanning and replanning the diglossia aspirations of constituencies is referred to as language-status planning. All in all, the field of societal multilingualism is far from a one-concept field and diglossia is merely one of its many central parameters of interest. I have ever before stressed the greater importance of long-term cultural continuity, rather than linguistic etiology in matters diglossic. A unified theory of societal multilingualism not only lays bare the few systematic underlying dimensions in accord with which many seemingly different phenomena can be seen in varying relationship with each other, but such a theory also ties in with other macrosystems as well.

Four factors (language [Yiddish/Hebrew], socialism/capitalism, Zionism/ Diasporism, and secularism/religion) defined the political space of interwar Polish Jewry. Language ideology was highly implicational vis-a-vis Zionism/Diasporism, but even in this connection there were exceptions, resulting in Yiddishist/Zionist combinations. Socialism/capitalism and secularism/religion were far less implicational, resulting in a substantial number of unique political combinations and an unusual number of rather small parties in addition to the few major ones. Although the political significance of language can be fully appreciated only in terms of its linkages to other major issues, some of these linkages are quite idiosyncratic and, therefore, nonimplicational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early nineteenth century a widely practiced from of digraphia. functionally differentiating between two type-fonts, began to fall apart in Eastern Europe. This differentiation had existed from the very beginnings of Hebrew print in Western and Central Europe in the mid-fifteenth century. One of these fonts, variously referred to as "square type" or "Assyrian writing," was generally reserved for materia sancta per se (the Pentateuch, other books of the Bible, the Tahmud, and the Prayer Books for weekday or Sabbath and holiday services. Except for the ancient Judeo-Aramaic translation-of the Pentateuch (Onkelos), often considered to be co-holy with the Hebrew original, all other translations into PostExilic Jewish vernaculars and all rabbinic responsa dealing with questions of halakhic interpretation were printed in the font known as "Rashi writing." This font was named after the outstanding eleventh-century German/French commentator whose manuscript "hand" became the prototype for all subsequent Rabbinic and Jewish vernacular publications, whether in Hebrew, Ladino/Judezmo or Yiddish. In sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, a version of "Rashi writing" became intimately associated with Yiddish as the vehicle of a sizable and a popular literature translating and commenting upon Holy Writ. Only when a large number of small printing establishments arose in Poland, White Russia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine specializing solely in mass-market chap-books and inexpensive editions of all holy books did a wholesale transition to just one type face, the square letters occur for both Yiddish and Holy Writ per se. Rashi-type scripts remained (and linger on, in part, to this very day) for Rashi per se, some... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]