Salikoko Mufwene is a linguist born in Mbaya-Lareme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. [1] Mufwene was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. [2]
Mufwene received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1979. [3]
He has worked extensively on the development of creole languages, especially Gullah and Jamaican Creole, on the morphosyntax of Bantu languages, especially Kituba, Lingala, and Kiyansi (the last of which he speaks natively [4] ), and on African American Vernacular English. [5] He has also published several articles and chapters about language evolution. [6]
He is one of the leading figures in research pertaining to the ecology of language, a school of thought that encourages a holistic approach of language studies and combines linguistics with different research fields such as sociology, history, cognitive sciences and biology. One of his main claims (Mufwene 2008) is that languages behave to a certain extent like viruses, and that many analogies can be drawn between the ways they both come to existence, reproduce, evolve, and eventually may go extinct.
In 2003, Mufwene was awarded a Médaille du Collège de France.
In 2018, Mufwene was inducted as a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. [7]
In 2022, Mufwene was elected as a fellow of the American Philosophical Society.
In 2023, Mufwene was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mufwene is the editor of the book series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact, an interdisciplinary series covering diverse perspectives on languages in contact, pidgins, creoles, language evolution, language change, and bilingualism. [8]
A pidgin, or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside.
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.
African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people, an African American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages, or as the result of migration, with an intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.
James David McCawley was a Scottish-American linguist.
Johanna Nichols is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Larry M. Hyman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in phonology and has particular interest in African languages.
Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.
John Russell Rickford is a Guyanese–American academic and author. Rickford is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he has taught since 1980. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford, won the American Book Award in 2000.
A post-creole continuum is a dialect continuum of varieties of a creole language between those most and least similar to the superstrate language. Due to social, political, and economic factors, a creole language can decreolize towards one of the languages from which it is descended, aligning its morphology, phonology, and syntax to the local standard of the dominant language but to different degrees depending on a speaker's status.
The language bioprogram theory or language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages. As articulated mostly by Derek Bickerton, creolization occurs when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured pidgin; these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar. As this capacity is universal, the grammars of these new languages have many similarities.
Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.
Larantuka Malay, also known as Nagi, is a Malay-based creole language spoken in the eastern part of Flores in Indonesia, especially in Larantuka. It is a derivative of Malay which is thought to originate from Malacca. It is a language with unspecified linguistic affiliation. According to 2007 data, this language is spoken by 20,000 speakers, mainly the people of East Flores. Larantuka Malay is the mother tongue of the Nagi people. Then it also functions as a second language for several nearby communities.
John Alexander Holm was an American academic. He was Chair of English Linguistics and History of Civilizations at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.
Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.
Tista Bagchi, Professor of Linguistics in the University of Delhi, is a distinguished Indian linguist and ethicist. Bagchi trained in Sanskrit College, Kolkata, the University of Delhi, and the University of Chicago, from where she obtained her PhD in Linguistics, her work spans issues of semantics and syntax in languages in general and South Asian languages in particular, questions of ethics in the application of medical technology and social interaction, and translations of iconic texts in Bangla literature and comparative philology. Bagchi has also been active in the area of cognitive sciences with special interests in the relationships amongst sentence structure, computation, linguistic meaning, and human cognition. Bagchi was the Robert F. & Margaret S. Goheen Fellow for the academic year 2001–2002 at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and a scientist under the CSIR Mobility Scheme at the National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies, New Delhi, for two years during 2010–2012.
Lenore A. Grenoble is an American linguist specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. She is currently the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor and chair at University of Chicago.
Marlyse Baptista is a linguist specializing in morphology, syntax, pidgin and creole languages, language contact, and language documentation. Until 2022, Baptista was the Uriel Weinreich Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, and now holds the position of President's Distinguished Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was elected President of the Linguistic Society of America for 2024.
Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.