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  • The Caribbeanist Mervyn C. Alleyne (1933-2016)
  • Don E. Walicek, Ph.D

Spanning a period of more than fifty years, Mervyn Coleridge Alleyne's vibrant career as a Caribbeanist produced valuable scholarship that enriched traditional disciplines while it also helped to define emergent fields of study, most significantly Caribbean linguistics. Much of his work in the latter area offers a holistic view of language, presenting insights that transcend the various subfields of linguistics. At the same time, the body of work that he leaves behind is of impressive interdisciplinary breadth. His publications—eight books and more than 100 chapters, articles, and reviews—include significant contributions in the areas of history, culture, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and folk medicine. He also had an impact on the more personal level, as his kindness, humility, good energy, and balanced spirit touched the hearts, minds, and daily lives of many: students, faculty, staff, friends, family, and colleagues, as well as readers near and far.


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Mervyn Coleridge Alleyne

Alleyne was born on 13 June 1933 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the fourth of five children. His parents were Coleridge Fitzgerald Alleyne, a builder and contractor, and Carmen Valeria Alleyne, an elementary school teacher. As a young boy, Alleyne studied in Port of Spain's Queen's Royal College. He grew up in the coastal town of St. James, a place famous for the Muslim festival of Hosay. Living close to the many elderly Indo-Trinidadians there apparently sparked an early interest in linguistic diversity and verbal play; as he recalled years later, this allowed him to learn to curse in Bhojpuri at a young age. [End Page 207]

After completing secondary school, he was awarded a scholarship to the fledgling University College of the West Indies. This opportunity led him to complete his B.A. in Spanish and French in Jamaica and also expanded his experience in the Caribbean. As an undergraduate, Alleyne fell in love with Haiti and spent each summer in Port-au-Prince, where the spirit of progressive change that invigorated much of the capital captivated him. He was impressed—and personally inspired by—the reality that Haitian rather than French was the language of the country. As he later recalled:

[Haitian] belonged to the people, they spoke in it, they wrote in it, and they were proud of it. This was 'the heyday of the postcolonial period' and I joined them in rejecting anything that smacked of the imperial order, in favor of a Caribbean perspective.1

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Later Alleyne completed graduate work in linguistic dialectology in France, where he worked in Lyon at a leading institute in his field. He completed a doctoral project focusing on wind names in Gallo-Romance languages. For this project he documented over 100 different names for winds in various varieties of French, working with linguistic geographers, collecting original data, and developing linguistic dialect maps. Alleyne recalled that some of the people that provided him with terms describing the wind were elders who had been born in the nineteenth century. His research revealed that they had learned how to understand and talk about the wind from their parents and grandparents. The University of Strasbourg awarded his Ph.D.

In 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution, Alleyne returned to Jamaica and began working at the University of the West Indies at Mona. He was hired as a lecturer to teach in two areas, Romance philology and French medieval literature. Soon, however, his understanding of his professional ambitions and the needs of Jamaican society began to change. Political leaders, professors, and students became increasingly vocal about the importance of Caribbean integration. Increasingly aware of the possibilities that could be realized through teaching about and doing research on the society in which they lived, he saw higher education as a strategic resource for positive social, economic, and political transformation. With this in mind, he chose to shift his attention away from his anticipated areas of academic inquiry.

The University of Puerto Rico assisted Alleyne with his transition to scholarship focusing on the Caribbean by awarding him a summer scholarship to do fieldwork in St. Lucia. The journal Caribbean Studies published the...

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