Salikoko Mufwene

Salikoko Mufwene is a linguist born in Mbaya-Lareme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. 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[1]), and on African American Vernacular English.[2] He has also published several articles and chapters about language evolution. Mufwene received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1979.

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.[3]

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 is that languages behave to a certain extent like animal species, and that many analogies can be drawn between the ways they both come to existence, reproduce, evolve, and eventually may go extinct.

Books
  • Mufwene, Salikoko; Steever, Sanford; Walker, Carol (1976). Papers from the Twelfth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago Linguistic Society.
  • Mufwene, Salikoko; Rickford, John; Bailey, Guy; Baugh, John (1998). African-American English. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11732-1.
  • Mufwene, Salikoko (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-511-01934-3.
  • Mufwene, Salikoko (2008). Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8264-9370-X.

References
  1. Chaudenson, Robert (2001). "Focus on Creolist: Salikoko S. Mufwene Mufwene". Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  2. "Salikoko S. Mufwene". The University of Chicago Department of Linguistics. Retrieved 7 November 2014.
  3. "Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2015-07-22.
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