Marlyse Baptista
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marlyse Baptista is a linguist specialized in the morphology and syntax of pidgin and creole languages. She uses descriptive, theoretical, and experimental methods to study these contact languages.[1] Until 2022, Baptista was the Uriel Weinreich Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan,[1] and now holds the position of President's Distinguished Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.[2]
Baptista's parents are from Cape Verde, she was born in Senegal and she grew up in France as part of the Cape Verdean diaspora.[3] After studying for a licence and then an MA in Anglophone literatures and civilizations at the Université de Bordeaux III, she moved to the United States where she fist studied at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Her subsequent studies took place at Harvard University, where she completed a PhD in linguistics, awarded in 1997.[4]
Post-PhD, she spent a year as a visiting scholar in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. From 1998 to 2007 she was first assistant professor then associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia. In 2007 she moved to the University of Michigan to take up a position as associate professor of linguistics and Afroamerican and African studies. She was promoted to full professor in 2011 and took up an endowed chair in 2019.[4] She now has an endowed chair at the University of Pennsylvania.
Honors
Since 2017 she has been a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).[5] She served on the Executive Committee of the LSA from 2018-2020.[6][7] She was elected President of the Linguistic Society of America for 2024.[8] She is also a past President (2011–2015) of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics.[9]. In 2025, she became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
