Dr Oliver Mayeux

I am a sociolinguist whose work is broadly concerned with language contact and change, particularly in the 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 methodological and theoretical approaches to so-called linguistic legacy materials — documentary materials left behind by linguists of the past.

I am currently Co-Director of the Cambridge Endangered Languages and Cultures Group (CELC) and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, University of Cambridge. I completed my PhD here at Cambridge in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Mari Jones and until October 2025 held a Title A (Junior Research) Fellowship at Trinity College.

Before coming to Cambridge, I studied for a BA in Korean & Linguistics with Yoruba at SOAS, University of London with a year at Korea University, Republic of Korea. During that time, I worked part-time as a Research Assistant in Korean Linguistics at SOAS and at the University of Oxford.