Honorary Members

Mervyn Alleyne was Professor of Sociolinguistics from 1982, and Professor Emeritus upon retirement. Following his retirement from Mona, Professor Alleyne taught for three years at the St. Augustine Campus of The UWI until 2003, after which he began a new career at the University of Puerto Rico where he functioned until 2014. He was also the Humanities Scholar (2007) at the Cave Hill campus of The UWI. Source - Caribbean Language Issues Old and New - Papers in honour of Professor Mervyn Alleyne on the Occasion of his sixtieth birthday (edited by Pauline Christie, Kingston: UWI Press, 1996).

Research Profile
It is as a pioneer in Creole Studies, however, that Alleyne made his real mark. He was one of the few Caribbean born participants in the second ever International Conference on Creole Languages held at Mona in April 1968, the proceedings of which were published in 1971 in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages edited by Dell Hymes. His paper “Acculturation and the Culture Matrix of Creolization” elaborated some of the themes which were to characterize his later work, namely his disagreement with the idea that creoles necessarily develop from prior pidgins and his not unrelated view that the considerable variation manifested among them can be explained by differing degrees of acculturation among Africans who came in contact with Europeans. In his opinion, such variation existed from the inception of these languages. To use his own words, "From the outset a kind of linguistic syncretism took place out of the clash with West African languages of certain West European languages in their full morphological and syntactical forms. The precise nature and degree of this syncretism depends on the way in which the cultural situation developed in each area in the Caribbean and elsewhere." (1971: 170). Alleyne repudiated the use of the term creole, arguing that its meaning is unclear. He carefully avoided it in his book Comparative Afro-American (1980), arguably the most quoted source on the relevant varieties. In addition to its detailed comparison of structural aspects of Sranan, Saramaccan, Jamaican, Guyanese, among others, this work reveals, not for the first time, his preoccupation with the Black experience as a whole, and with the autonomy of Black culture. His fascination with the correlations between the linguistic picture and other aspects of culture, such as religion, is again manifested in Roots of Jamaican Culture (1988). A committed substratist, he considers it axiomatic that in change arising out of the kind of language contact that existed between African and European, “there will be transmissions or continuities from the native languages of the people undergoing linguistic change” (1980: 139), even if in some instances these are eventually discarded. He was also a dedicated Caribbeanist, working on the various languages of the region, publishing in French and Spanish as well as English, and studying languages of the French- and Spanish-official of Caribbean. Source - Caribbean Language Issues Old and New - Papers in honour of Professor Mervyn Alleyne on the Occasion of his sixtieth birthday (edited by Pauline Christie, Kingston: UWI Press, 1996).

Recognition/Awards/Distinctions
Humanities Scholar, The UWI, Cave Hill Campus Barbados, 2007
Honorary Member, Society for Caribbean Linguistics, 1998
Honorary Member, Linguistics Society of America, 1997

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