Oliver Mayeux

Éy laba, byinvini! Hello, welcome!

Mo travay enho lingwistik a University of Cambridge, a Langlatèr. Mo war komen langaj pe shanjé kan moun arèt parlé yêchènn langaj é komens parlé in nòt, ou kan moun fé kishòj pou chinbo yê langaj vivan. Mo gèt komen moun apé parlé kréyòl dan Lalwizyann jou jòrdi é mèt ça ensemb èk ça no konnin apré komen moun t'apé parlé lontem pasé. Ina pa in ta d moun ki stìl apé parlé kréyòl, probab ent 3,500 é 6,000. Mo swèt mô travay èd nouzòt konné pli pou nôchènn bèl langaj k'apé gònn: langaj gombo, kouri-vini, kréyòl.

I am a linguist at the University of Cambridge, where I'm currently Co-Director of the Cambridge Endangered Languages and Cultures Group (CELC) and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics. My research is broadly concerned with language variation, contact, and change, particularly in the intensive contexts of endangerment, revitalization, and creolization. In other words, I'm interested in the rise and fall of languages: how grammars vary and change over time as people start using new vernaculars, shift to speaking other varieties, or attempt to (re-)learn their heritage language. I work mainly on Louisiana Creole, spoken by between 3,500 and 6,000 people living mostly in South Louisiana, where I have been conducting fieldwork for a decade. Louisiana Creole and French are part of my own heritage, and I've been involved in the language revitalization scene since I was a teenager.

Other contact varieties that interest me include Tây Bồi (Vietnamese Pidgin French), Naijá (Nigerian Pidgin), Haitian, and the emergent multilingual practices of urban Francophone West Africa and the Vietnamese diaspora. I also study the history of linguistics, and am particularly interested in linguistic legacy materials — documentary materials left behind by linguists of the past.

Ki mo yê | Biography

I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2019 and until October 2025 held a Title A Junior Research Fellowship there at Trinity College. My PhD thesis (2019), supervised by Professor Mari Jones, sought to question the notion of decreolization and to test empirically whether creoles undergo the same processes of contact-induced language change as other languages. I built and analysed a diachronic corpus of Louisiana Creole which included three centuries' of data, including new data from my own fieldwork and from social media. For several years I have also been involved in the revitalization of Louisiana's unique, fascinating Creole language (and published a ten-year retrospective in 2024). In 2020, some friends and I co-authored the first learner's guide to the language, the Ti Liv Kréyòl. Baton Rouge Poet Laureate Jonathan Mayers and I also co-edited Févi (2022), the first anthology of contemporary poetry in Louisiana Creole (also probably the first ever book to be written completely in the language!).

Before coming to Cambridge for my MPhil and PhD, I studied for a BA in Korean and Linguistics with Yoruba at SOAS with a year at Korea University (고려대학교). During that time, I worked as a Research Assistant in Korean Linguistics at SOAS and the University of Oxford, and also as a bookseller at my favourite bookshop. I grew up between Scotland and Nigeria to an English mother and a Louisianian father, a childhood I blame for my lifelong love for languages and my weird accent in English and French. 'Mayeux' is a fairly common Creole family name of Avoyelles Parish and is pronounced [mɑˈjø] in Louisiana Creole and French.

Alon sharé! | Contact

Hopefully this website will be a way for me to exchange research, receive feedback, and make new connections. Please do get in touch by e-mail (📧 ofm23 аt cam dоt ac dоt uk) if you'd like to chat! Please note that I do not consent to recieving material generated by Large Language Models ("Artificial Intelligence").

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