
Nicholas Evans
Nicholas (Nick) Evans is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, and directs the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) and the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative (ECDI) at the Australian National University.
He has carried out wide-ranging fieldwork over four decades on indigenous languages of Australia and Papua New Guinea. This has resulted in grammars of the Australian languages Kayardild (Mouton de Gruyter 1995) and Bininj Gun-wok (Pacific Linguistics 2003), and dictionaries of the Australian languages Kayardild and Dalabon and the Papuan language Nen. The extraordinary challenges posed by these languages for received views of how languages function inspired his influential 2009 article with Stephen Levinson in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “The Myth of Language Universals“.
Among the books he has edited or coedited are Archaeology and Linguistics: Global Perspectives on Ancient Australia (1997, with Pat McConvell), The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region (2003), Catching language: the standing challenge of grammar-writing (2006, with Felix Ameka and Alan Dench), Reciprocals and Semantic Typology (2011, with Alice Gaby, Stephen Levinson & Asifa Majid ), Insubordination (2014, with Honore Watanabe) and The Oxford Guide to Polysynthesis (2017), with Michael Fortescue and Marianne Mithun).
He has also published over 200 scientific papers. His popular book Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us, has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, and German.
More broadly, his driving interests are the interplay between the diversity contained in the world’s endangered languages and the many scientific and humanistic questions they can help us answer about human history, culture, mind and society. He has also worked in Native Title claims, as an interpreter of Aboriginal art, and a translator of Aboriginal oral literature.
Professor Evans is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Social Sciences Academy, a corresponding member of the British Academy, and a recipient of the Anneliese Maier Forschungspreis, and the Ken Hale Award from the Linguistics Society of America.





