Joan R. Rayfield was an English and Canadian anthropologist and linguist, who was a Professor of Anthropology at York University.[1] Her publications include The Languages of a Bilingual Community about the uses of Yiddish and English in bilingual Ashkenazic Jewish communities in California in the 1960s,[2] and an English translation of Jacques Maquet's The Black Civilization of Africa and Africanicity. She died at the age of 82 in 2001.