Mervyn C. Alleyne

Mervyn Coleridge Alleyne (Trinidad and Tobago, 13 June 1933 - 23 November 2016) was a sociolinguist, creolist and dialectologist whose work focused on the creole languages of the Caribbean.

He attended Queen's Royal College in Port-of-Spain and later won a scholarship to the fledgling University College of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica which he entered in 1953. After graduating from Mona, Alleyne obtained a PhD from the University of Strasbourg, France. He returned to the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona as a lecturer in 1959, and was made Professor of Sociolinguistics in 1982. He returned to his homeland for a brief spell and lectured at the St Augustine campus of the UWI. He was a visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

Upon retirement from The University of the West Indies, Mona, the title of Professor emeritus was conferred on him. He was president of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL) from 1990 to 1992 and was made an honorary member of the SCL in 1998. He also became an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1996. He is a co-founder of the journal ''Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages''. In 1996, a festschrift in his honour was published: ''Caribbean Language Issues, Old & New: Papers in Honour of Professor Mervyn Alleyne on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday'' (edited by Pauline Christie, and published by UWI Press). In March 2007, Alleyne was the Humanities Scholar 2007 at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. In October 2011, he was the guest of honour at the special panel discussion “The Interdisciplinary Scholarship of a Caribbeanist: A Tribute to Dr. Mervyn Alleyne,” an activity organized at the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras. Provided by Wikipedia