Salikoko S. Mufwene

Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Professor on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and on the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. His current research is in evolutionary linguistics, which he approaches from an ecological perspective, focused on the phylogenetic emergence of language and on how languages have been affected by colonization and world-wide globalization, especially regarding the indigenization of European languages in the colonies and language birth and death. Mufwene has authored three books: The Ecology of Language Evolution (CUP, 2001), Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique (l’Harmattan, 2005), and Language Evolution: Contact, competition and change (Continuum Press, 2008). He has (co-)edited several other books and authored close to 250 articles, book chapters, and reviews on the above topics and others. He is the founding editor of Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact. His distinctions include lectures at the Collège de France (Fall 2003) and teaching at Harvard University (spring 2002) and three times at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America (1999, 2005, 2015). He was also a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Lyon (2010-2011).