Salikoko mufwene biography of abraham

Congolese linguist

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]

Education and career

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 lang