Academic career
Mufwene began his academic career as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies,Mona campus,in Jamaica from January 1980 to August 1981. He then joined the University of Georgia,where he served as assistant professor from 1981 to 1986,associate professor from 1986 to 1991,and full professor in 1991 in the Department of Anthropology. [3] [4] In December that year,he moved to the University of Chicago as a full professor,where he has remained since.
At the University of Chicago,Mufwene served as Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 1995 to 2001. He was appointed the Frank J. McLorraine Distinguished Service Professor in 2004 and became the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in 2021. [5] He also served as Academic Director of the University of Chicago Center in Paris from 2013 to 2014 and again from 2022 to 2023, [6] as well as Interim Academic Director of the Center for the Study of Race,Politics,and Culture (CSRPC) from 2018 to 2020. [7] [6]
He is affiliated with several multidisciplinary programs at the University of Chicago,including the Committee on African Studies,the Committee on Evolutionary Biology,and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. [6]
Research
Mufwene's research focuses on creole studies,language evolution (including language vitality),and African linguistics. He has published extensively (several books and hundreds of essays) on the development of creole languages,particularly Gullah [11] and Jamaican Creole, [12] on the morphosyntax of Bantu languages [13] such as Kituba,Lingala,and Kiyansi. [14] [15] [16] His work also addresses the structure and history of African American Vernacular English. [17] [18]
He is noted for advancing the ecological approach to language evolution,in which he analogizes languages to viruses at the mercy of their hosts (speakers and signers) influenced by sociocultural,historical,and environmental factors. In his seminal books The Ecology of Language Evolutions (2001) and Language Evolution:Contact,Competition and Change (2008),Mufwene draws analogies between mechanisms of language evolution and those of biological evolution,arguing that languages undergo changes through mechanisms similar to those affecting viruses,including dependence on the activities of their hosts,competition,and selection,which can facilitate spread or cause extinction. [19] An important difference is that,unlike viruses,languages do not colonize their hosts,who are in fact also their creators. He conceives of languages as technologies produced by humans’domestication of their anatomies to produce linguistic communication. [20]
His contributions to the historical fold of evolutionary linguistics shed light on the role of colonization and globalization in shaping linguistic change and diversity. Invoking ecology-specific dynamics,he invokes differential evolution to explain why European colonial languages speciated into divergent varieties (creoles,pidgins,and other indigenized varieties) and why the processes of language endangerment and loss have not proceeded uniformly around the world. [21]
Mufwene is the founding editor of the Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact series,which publishes interdisciplinary research on creoles,pidgins,other outcomes of language contact,and structural change in languages. [22] [23]
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