Lectures on Tap - "America's Lost Languages: European, Indigenous, & More"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "America's Lost Languages: European, Indigenous, and More"

🎤 Speaker: Salikoko S. Mufwene

Join us for an illuminating evening as Professor Salikoko S. Mufwene examines how land dispossession, forced assimilation, and racialized barriers have shaped language loss in America—especially among Native American communities.

Professor Mufwene will explore how the disruption of indigenous economic and social systems, the brutality of boarding schools, and migrations from reservations to farms and cities pushed Native peoples into using colonial languages. He will also compare this experience with that of Continental European immigrants, highlighting how race determined who was welcomed into “mainstream” American life and whose languages were left to wither.

Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. A leading scholar of evolutionary linguistics and language vitality, he has authored and edited numerous books and articles and is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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