22
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 22 JANUARY, 2017
The stellar contributions
to Caribbean linguistics
made by Mervyn Coleridge Alleyne will indefinitely
resonate among language and identity scholars in the
region and his presence will be missed for a long time.
At the start of his academic career, Alleyne taught
French dialectology and French medieval literature.
He acknowledged the influence of the anthropologist
SidneyMintz on his transition fromPhilology, French
Dialectology and Medieval French Literature to
Linguistics more broadly, the field in which he became
a pioneering academic and scholar.
Alleyne was a fervently Caribbean person and
it was not long before he applied his skills and
the discipline earned from exposure to French
dialectology to address problems of what he later
termed “oppressed languages of the Caribbean.” For
him, “Caribbean” included the “Francophone and
Hispanic” Caribbean. The vision embraced in his
definition has eroded, albeit slowly, the linguistic
parochialism that has characterised academics in the
Anglophone (or English-official) Caribbean.
His seminal work, “Comparative Afro-American,”
exposed the major areas of similarity across the
languages described as “creole” by other linguists. He
himself did not consider the term “creole” adequate for
the languages it attempted to describe. For Alleyne, the
similarities were brought on by the circumstances and
experiences of the persons who speak these languages
rather than by their exemplifying an exotic typology.
He used the national names for these languages – he
insisted that he spoke “Trinidadian” even though
he lived virtually all of his adult life outside of the
country of his birth; Jamaicans spoke “Jamaican,” not
Jamaican Creole; and Haitians spoke “Haitian,” not
Haitian Creole. It was a statement of empowerment
through language.
Alleyne had an abiding disrespect for orthodoxy, a
fiercely protective attitude towards the African heritage
in Caribbean languages and a facility with argument
that was difficult to defeat. He was supportive of
creative and imaginative thinking, tolerant of views
contrary to his, gentle in his rebuke and resolute in
his personal beliefs and perspectives. He treated all
persons with considerable respect for their humanity
even though he might have been very opposed to their
expressed positions.
His graduate students were marked by his
mentoring. He urged them to go for the extra bit of
information, to answer the fringe question that could
embarrass their certainty about an analysis. One
could grow impatient with him but the insights that
came from responding to his skepticism were always
rewarding, making his resistance a motivator for the
Lawrence Carrington is Emeritus Professor of Creole Linguistics of The UWI and was Professor Alleyne’s first PhD student in the 1960s
Ian Robertson is a retired Professor of Linguistics at the St Augustine Campus
TRIBUTE
MERVYNCOLERIDGE ALLEYNE
A Life well lived
B Y L A W R E N C E D . C A R R I N G T O N A N D I A N E . R O B E R T S O N
improvement of one’s work. He was not easily diverted
from his positions but after the argument, he lived
comfortably with your own decision to be different.
Alleyne’s conviction that understanding
acculturation processes was critical to understanding
Caribbean languages led him to explore themes
beyond linguistics. His 1988 “Roots of Jamaican
Culture” added a new dimension to his scholarship,
a dimension that found equally powerful expression
in his 2002 publication “The Construction and
Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean
and the World.”
This illustrious Emeritus Professor of The UWI,
was born in Trinidad and Tobago on June 13, 1933
and died onNovember 23, 2016. He was schooled at
Mucurapo EC School (now St Agnes EC School)
and Queen’s Royal College, and entered the
then University College of the West Indies
(UCWI) on scholarship in 1953. After
completing a Bachelor’s degree, he proceeded
to a doctoral degree (Docteur d’Université,
DU) at Strasbourg University in France. He
returned to the Caribbean as a lecturer at the
UCWI in 1959, rising to the rank of Professor
of Sociolinguistics in 1982. He retired from
the Mona Campus of The UWI in 1998 as
Professor Emeritus. Although based primarily
atThe UWI for themajority of his career, he was
a frequent long-term visiting faculty member at
other universities, notably the State University
of New York at Buffalo, Indiana University at
Bloomington, University of Amsterdam, and the
University of Puerto Rico, Stanford University, the
then Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, and
was the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor at
Kansas University.
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.
He was a member of the advisory
committee on the “Dictionary of
Caribbean EnglishUsage” and served
on several campus and university
committees. He had a central role in
establishing the language laboratory
at the Mona Campus and charted
the way for the programme in
Caribbean Dialectology. The Society for Caribbean
Linguistics, of which he was one of the first members
(1972) and of which he was a former President (1990-
1992), conferred honorarymembership onhim in 1998
in recognition of his outstanding scholarship and his
contribution to the disciplines under its purview. He
was also one of the founders of the “Journal of Pidgin
and Creole Languages,” and was also an honorary
member of the Linguistic Society of America (1997).
Mervyn Coleridge Alleyne lived a rich and
meaningful life as an academic and influenced many
people.
