Professor Nick Evans FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2011
- Subjects
- Anthropology, Linguistics
- Sections
- Linguistics and Philology
Summary
Nicholas Evans has carried out wide-ranging fieldwork on traditional languages of northern Australia and southern Papua New Guinea. The driving interest of his work is the interplay between documenting and describing the incredible diversity contained in the world's endangered languages and the many scientific and humanistic questions they can help us answer. In addition to book-length grammars and dictionaries of several Aboriginal languages (grammars: Kayardild, Bininj Gun-wok; dictionaries: Kayardild, Dalabon) and edited collections on numerous linguistic topics, he has published over 160 scientific papers. His crossover book Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us sets out a broad program for engaging with the world's dwindling linguistic diversity. He has also worked as a linguist, interpreter and anthropologist in two Native Title claims, and as a promotor of Aboriginal art.
Current post
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University Laureate Professor and Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
Publications
Other Fellows of the British Academy
Professor John Rickford FBA
Theoretical and descriptive aspects of variation and change in Caribbean Anglophone creoles and American vernaculars, especially African American English, and their implications for educational reform and criminal justice
Professor Katalin É. Kiss FBA
Generative linguistic theory; syntax, the syntax of Hungarian, information structure, the grammar of quantification
