Salikoko S Mufwene
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 88689 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Salikoko S Mufwene |
| NOMBRES | Salikoko S |
| APELLIDO | Mufwene |
| FIRMA | MUFWENE S S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8942-2626 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 102 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 129 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 101 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1980 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Diachrony and Diachronica
Exceptionalizing genetic creolistics
Article Exceptionalizing genetic creolistics: a rejoinder to Mikael Parkvall and Bart Jacobs on the emergence of Berbice Dutch was published on April 1, 2023 in the journal Folia Linguistica (volume 57, issue 1)
Sound language policies must be consistent with natural language evolution
Societal multilingualism and multilectalism have been among the leading justifications for language policies, especially in the Global South, where many of these have failed. I associate the failures with poor choices of official languages and media of education, which are not consistent with the linguistic behaviors of the majority of the citizenry and the socioeconomic structures of the relevant polities. I review some cases of adequate and ina…
Ideology and facts on African American English
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Linguistic Hybridization in the Emergence of Creoles
In this article I show how ubiquitous hybridity is in cultures. It is enabled by layers of population movements and contacts since the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa around 50,000 years ago. I demonstrate how hybridization has proceeded in the emergence of creole language varieties and show that the same process has also driven, for instance, the emergence and differential evolution of English and the speciation of Vulgar Latin into the …
Variation Rolls the Dice
Variation Rolls the Dice: A worldwide collage in honour of Salikoko S. Mufwene aims to celebrate Mufwene’s ground-breaking contribution to linguistics in the past four decades. The title also encapsulates his approach to language as both systemic and socio-cultural practices, and the role of variation in determining particular evolutionary trajectories in specific linguistic ecologies. The book therefore focuses on variation within and across lan…
Commentary
In this commentary we respond to the articles of this special issue focusing on the proposal for a sociolinguistics of diaspora. We discuss especially whether diaspora as conceptualized in the articles helps sociolinguists better understand the intersection of migration, globalization, and language. Central to our comments is the question of whether the concept of diaspora is operationalized clearly enough to do the metalinguistic job it is invok…
Créoles
Creoles and pidgins
I review the contact ecologies that produced pidgins as opposed to creoles. I underscore the role played by interpreters during both the trade and the exploitation colonization of Africa (and less extensively Asia and the Pacific islands) and question the received doctrine. That is, pidgins lexified by European languages emerged in especially trade settings in which the European merchants and the indigenous populations had no language in common; …
Language Shift
Language shift (LS) is interpreted in this entry as the outcome of fewer and fewer opportunities or motivations that particular speakers have to practice their heritage vernacular. As a process it may, but need not, lead to language endangerment and loss. It can be domain‐specific and proceeds at different speeds among the members of the relevant population. It occurs especially in polities that are culturally assimilationist and where the socioe…
Robert Chaudenson (1937-2020)
Le 7 Avril 2020, Robert Chaudenson, dont la santé était déclinante depuis quelque temps déjà, a été emporté par la COVID-19 à l’âge de 83 ans. L’une des figures les plus éminentes de la créolistique s’éteignait ainsi après plus de quarante ans de labeur incessant. Né le 12 avril 1937 à Lyon, agrégé de lettres classiques, Robert Chaudenson est parti à la Réunion en 1963 comme volontaire du service national actif (VSNA). Il s’est immédiatement inté…
William J. Samarin
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Robert Chaudenson, 1937–2020
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The legacy of Braj B. Kachru through World Englishes and culture wars
In honor of Professor Braj B. Kachru, this paper highlights the legacy of his final monograph, World Englishes and culture wars . Professor Kachru was a towering figure among world Englishes scholars as well as students of language contact. World Englishes and culture wars highlights the role of English in the lives of many of its Outer Circle and Expanding Circle users of the language, simultaneously acknowledging the tension from the evolution …
Complexity in Language
The question of complexity, as in what makes one language more 'complex' than another, is a long-established topic of debate amongst linguists. Recently, this issue has been complemented with the view that languages are complex adaptive systems, in which emergence and self-organization play major roles. However, few students of the phenomenon have gone beyond the basic assessment of the number of units and rules in a language (what has been chara…
It’s still worth theorizing on LEL, despite the heterogeneity and complexity of the processes (Response to commentators)
I am grateful for the generally thought-provoking commentaries on my target article (Mufwene 2017), which reveal how multifaceted and complex the subject matter of LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT AND LOSS (LEL) is. They also show how difficult it is to develop a position that addresses all of the issues. Because of space limitations, my responses focus on the most critical ones
Language vitality
As linguists theorize about language endangerment and loss (LEL), we must understand the big picture: the coexistence of languages in particular polities and how the competition that sometimes arises is resolved. Many concerns have been voiced about LEL since the early 1990s, but theoretical developments regarding language vitality lag far behind linguists’ current investment in language advocacy. While discussing issues such as the failure to co…
Pidgin and Creole Languages
Creoles and pidgins don’t have inadequate lexica
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Colonization, indigenization, and the differential evolution of English
ABSRACTThis paper provides an overview of research on the emergence of creoles and pidgins, how these are related to 'indigenized Englishes,' and whether these evolutions have occurred in fundamentally different ways from other colonial English varieties such as North American and Australian Englishes. The findings of this research strongly suggest that, from an ecological perspective, similar processes of language contact are crucial to the deve…
Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America
Iberian Imperialism and Language Evolution in Latin America
The case was never closed
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Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins
This review article is a response to the way the editors of and contributors to Simplicity and Complexity in Creoles and Pidgins respond to McWhorter’s (2001) claim that creoles have the world’s simplest grammars. Although I agree with the contributors that creoles are not as simple as they may look to some, I express several concerns about the ways they (fail to) raise and/or address some fundamental issues regarding the subject matter. These in…
Namhee Lee, Lisa Mikesell, Anna Dina L. Joacquin, Andrea W. Mates, and John H. Schumann
Journal Article Namhee Lee, Lisa Mikesell, Anna Dina L. Joacquin, Andrea W. Mates, and John H. Schumann: The Interactional Instinct: The Evolution and Acquisition of Language. Get access Namhee Lee, Lisa Mikesell, Anna Dina L. Joacquin, Andrea W. Mates, and John H. Schumann: THE INTERACTIONAL INSTINCT: THE EVOLUTION AND ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE. Oxford University Press, 2009. Salikoko S. Mufwene Salikoko S. Mufwene The University of Chicago, USA E…
Language Birth and Death
Since the late 1980s, language endangerment and death have been discussed as if the phenomena had no connection at all with language birth. More recently the phenomena have been associated almost exclusively with the intense and pervasive economic globalization of same period, a process that some authors have reduced too easily to the McDonaldization phenomenon. Moreover, the relation of globalization to different forms of colonization has been p…
Language vitality
As linguists theorize about language endangerment and loss (LEL), we must understand the big picture: the coexistence of languages in particular polities and how the competition that sometimes arises is resolved. Many concerns have been voiced about LEL since the early 1990s, but theoretical developments regarding language vitality lag far behind linguists’ current investment in language advocacy. While discussing issues such as the failure to co…
Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘weak’ languages
Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing voices: the extinction of the world's languages . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x+241
New Englishes and criteria for naming them
This paper argues for the extension of the term 'new English' to English creoles. It finds the distinction between 'native' and 'indigenized/nativized' Englishes as inadequate from the point of view of language genesis as the distinction between 'indigenized' and 'creole' Englishes. It argues that the criteria used for these distinctions are largely ethnographic and sociohistorical; more may be learned from treating them as different outcomes of …
Population Movements and Contacts in Language Evolution
I argue for uniformitarianism (Mufwene 2001) in accounts of language evolution. Below, after dismissing a few myths about the development of creoles, I show how what we have learned to date about this case of language speciation prompts genetic linguists to reopen the books about language diversification in general and as a concomitant of language death in many cases. I adduce various examples from distant and recent histories to illustrate how p…
The Ecology of Gullah's Survival
L'A. analyse les facteurs ecologiques qui ont contribue au maintien du gullah, creole anglais parle par les descendants africains-americains vivant aux Etats-Unis, sur la cote sud de la Caroline, ainsi qu'en Georgie. L'identite linguistique, l'appartenance au groupe, l'isolement social et geographique, sont autant de facteurs ecologiques qui ont permis a cette communaute linguistique, pourtant assez reduite numeriquement, de conserver sa langue
How African Is Gullah, and Why
Number Delimitation in Gullah
ONE OF THE MOST ELUSIVE and challenging aspects of studying (contemporary) Gullah is the amount of both interand intra-individual variation in spontaneous speech even at the level of what may be considered its basilect.' The investigator is very likely to hear in the same discourse (though not with equal frequency) alternations such as [bil bin/woz horn] 'Bill was home' (where [bin] and [waz] are synonymous), or [A SAm]/[A si It]/[A S3: It] 'I sa…
Colonization, population contacts, and the emergence of new language varieties
Peter Trudgill's account of new-dialect formation is uniformitarian, a position I have embraced explicitly since Mufwene 2001. In Mufwene 2006, I show how similar the mechanisms involved are to those that account for the emergence of creoles, the basic difference lying in the composition of the contact setting's feature pool (see also below). The position I defend is even less moderate, as I argue that in the history of humankind language speciat…
The linguistic significance of African proper names in Gullah
Aside from bringing Gullah (the English-related creole which still thrives among rural Blacks on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States) to the attention of more linguists and to the forefront of studies on Atlantic creoles, another one of Lorenzo Dow Turner's contributions has been putting African proper names among the core evidence in support of the African substrate theory of the formation of these new languages. General…
Commentary
In this commentary we respond to the articles of this special issue focusing on the proposal for a sociolinguistics of diaspora. We discuss especially whether diaspora as conceptualized in the articles helps sociolinguists better understand the intersection of migration, globalization, and language. Central to our comments is the question of whether the concept of diaspora is operationalized clearly enough to do the metalinguistic job it is invok…
Colonization, indigenization, and the differential evolution of English
ABSRACTThis paper provides an overview of research on the emergence of creoles and pidgins, how these are related to 'indigenized Englishes,' and whether these evolutions have occurred in fundamentally different ways from other colonial English varieties such as North American and Australian Englishes. The findings of this research strongly suggest that, from an ecological perspective, similar processes of language contact are crucial to the deve…
La fonction et les formes réfléchies dans le mauricien et la haïtien
Creole languages do not exhibit morphosyntactic features that are specific to them, but they are related by the particular sociohistorical settings of their emergence, in language-contact situations. They provide an opportunity to scrutinize structural issues left aside in the description of other languages. This paper examines the relationship between reflexive forms and reflexive function in two creole languages, addressing the issue of reflexi…
Introduction
On the Status of Auxiliary Verbs in Gullah
L'auteur de l'article repond positivement aux deux questions suivantes : la notion du verbe auxiliaire peut-elle aussi s'appliquer au Gullah ? les marqueurs (temps, apsect, mode) font-ils partie de la classe des verbes auxiliaires dans cette langue
Some Reasons Why Gullah is not Dying Yet
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Creoles and universal grammar
Equivocal Structures in Some Gullah Complex Sentences
complementizer, which has been suffixed to the verb by a transformation. While this abstract analysis has had a certain appeal (note the treatment of the English gerundive -ing in transformational grammar), it could also be counterargued that in the case of Latin the infinitive is governed by the presence of the higher verb (which calls for this particular construction), just as the subjunctive is governed by the presence of ut(i)lne (or the high…
English pidgins
This paper highlights similarities and variation in both the form and function of English pidgins the world over. Their ethnographic functions are shown to vary from that of the lingua franca in Africa and Asia to that of local vernaculars in the New World. Although these pidgins usually have an in-group, and sometimes politically integrative, function, very few of them have ever succeeded in being elevated to the high status of varieties used in…
Observations on Time Reference in Jamaican and Guyanese Creoles
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Créoles
It’s still worth theorizing on LEL, despite the heterogeneity and complexity of the processes (Response to commentators)
I am grateful for the generally thought-provoking commentaries on my target article (Mufwene 2017), which reveal how multifaceted and complex the subject matter of LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT AND LOSS (LEL) is. They also show how difficult it is to develop a position that addresses all of the issues. Because of space limitations, my responses focus on the most critical ones
Reflections on World Englishes
What it Means When We Say 'Creole
Dictionaries and Proper Names
It is argued in this paper that proper names are linguistic signs, and, just like other denoting lexical units, they are also carriers of some formal linguistic restrictions regarding, e.g., gender and number. They also have some idiosyncrasies regarding spelling and pronunciation, the kind of information, which like the preceding, is expected to be found in the dictionary rather than an encyclopedia. Thus their inclusion in an unabridged diction…
Number, countability and markedness in Lingala LI/-MA- noun class
Linguistics
Observations on Time Reference in Jamaican and Guyanese Creoles
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Linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics
Some bantu ways of talking
More on Vernacular Black Speech
The linguistic significance of African proper names in Gullah
Aside from bringing Gullah (the English-related creole which still thrives among rural Blacks on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States) to the attention of more linguists and to the forefront of studies on Atlantic creoles, another one of Lorenzo Dow Turner's contributions has been putting African proper names among the core evidence in support of the African substrate theory of the formation of these new languages. General…
Kinship terms (and related honorifics)
Most bilingual dictionaries are based on the controversial assumption that every basic, non‐technical, word or phrase of the ‘object language’ has a counterpart with more or less the same meaning and pattern of use in the ‘metalanguage’. Consequently, a lot of information has been omitted regarding formal and pragmatic constraints on the usages of many headwords in the ‘object language’, thus making bilingual dictionaries of limited help. Focusin…
Restrictive Relativization in Gullah
It is argued in this paper that there are three kinds of relative clause (RC) strategies in Gullah: the deletion, WH-pronoun, and resumptive pronoun (RP) strategies. The deletion strategy applies to RC's beginning with a null (0) COMP or a purposive fuh, the WH strategy applies to Ø-COMP RC's, and the RP strategy applies to any of the above kinds. The latter actually complements the former two in allowing relativization where a gap is not permitt…
Number Delimitation in Gullah
ONE OF THE MOST ELUSIVE and challenging aspects of studying (contemporary) Gullah is the amount of both interand intra-individual variation in spontaneous speech even at the level of what may be considered its basilect.' The investigator is very likely to hear in the same discourse (though not with equal frequency) alternations such as [bil bin/woz horn] 'Bill was home' (where [bin] and [waz] are synonymous), or [A SAm]/[A si It]/[A S3: It] 'I sa…
Language Variety in the South
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How African Is Gullah, and Why
Why Study Pidgins and Creoles
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Starting on the Wrong Foot
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Dictionaries and Proper Names
It is argued in this paper that proper names are linguistic signs, and, just like other denoting lexical units, they are also carriers of some formal linguistic restrictions regarding, e.g., gender and number. They also have some idiosyncrasies regarding spelling and pronunciation, the kind of information, which like the preceding, is expected to be found in the dictionary rather than an encyclopedia. Thus their inclusion in an unabridged diction…
The pragmatics of kinship terms in Kituba
English pidgins
This paper highlights similarities and variation in both the form and function of English pidgins the world over. Their ethnographic functions are shown to vary from that of the lingua franca in Africa and Asia to that of local vernaculars in the New World. Although these pidgins usually have an in-group, and sometimes politically integrative, function, very few of them have ever succeeded in being elevated to the high status of varieties used in…
Colonial, Hypermetropic, And Wishful Linguistics
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Some Explanations that Strike Me as Incomplete
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On the so-called ‘infinitive’ in Atlantic creoles
Equivocal Structures in Some Gullah Complex Sentences
complementizer, which has been suffixed to the verb by a transformation. While this abstract analysis has had a certain appeal (note the treatment of the English gerundive -ing in transformational grammar), it could also be counterargued that in the case of Latin the infinitive is governed by the presence of the higher verb (which calls for this particular construction), just as the subjunctive is governed by the presence of ut(i)lne (or the high…
Pidgins and Creoles
La syntaxe des relatives en français
Linguistics (70 obras) · Philosophy (61 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (54 obras) · Sociology (53 obras) · History (39 obras) · Computer Science (38 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (37 obras) · Philosophy (37 obras) · History (31 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (26 obras)