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.
[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.
[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 language studies and combines linguistics with different research fields such as sociology, history, cognitive sciences and biology.
One of his main claims (Mufwene 2008) is that languages behave to a certain extent like viruses, and that many analogies can be drawn between the ways they both come to existence, reproduce, evolve, and eventually may go extinct.