Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics

Professor Nicholas Evans is awarded the 2025 Neil and Saras Smith Medal for his long and distinguished career working on endangered languages, both documenting hitherto undescribed languages and exploring the consequences of such data for general linguistic theory.

Nick is awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics for his research into a wide range of languages, often endangered, from Australia and New Guinea, and for exploring their consequences for general linguistic theory. His research has contributed to our understanding of the nature of language contact, its interaction with internally motivated linguistic change, and the way such changes lead to the development of linguistic areas.

Nick Evans, born 21 February 1956, is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific.

He was previously professor at the University of Melbourne, and a Humboldt Fellow at Universität zu Köln. After undergraduate studies in biology and psychology he switched to linguistics, obtaining his PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1986.

His doctoral thesis, a grammar of Kayardild language, uncovered previously unknown linguistic phenomena. He then spent two and a half years teaching linguistics to speakers of various Australian Aboriginal languages at the then School of Australian Linguistics in the Northern Territory before moving to the University of Melbourne in 1988, where he played a founding role in developing the linguistics program.

Nick Evans' research focuses on linguistic diversity, especially of fragile and endangered languages, and what this tells us about the nature of language, culture, deep history, and human creativity.

He has carried out extensive fieldwork on Aboriginal languages of Northern Australia (Kayardild, Bininj Kunwok, Dalabon, Iwaidja) and Papua New Guinea (Nen, Idi) and continues to spend several months each year on fieldwork across these languages.

Grappling with the extremely different linguistic structures of these languages led him to challenge received ideas about Universal Grammar, most influentially in his co-authored article with Steve Levinson (2009 on 'The Myth of Language Universals' in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Beyond this, he is interested in all aspects of language, from questions of grammar-writing, linguistic typology, translation and historical linguistics.

The central role of language in the transmission of culture has also led him, as an interpreter, anthropologist and cultural advocate, to work in the area of Native Title Claims and of Aboriginal Art. Words of Wonder: What Endangered Languages Tell Us (2nd Edition, Wiley, 2020), has been translated into French, German, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.

His more than 250 scientific publications, include seven monographs (grammars of the Australian languages Kayardild and Bininj Gunwok, dictionaries of the Australian languages Kayardild and Dalabon and the Papuan language Nen), and nine edited books. Among these 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). Soon to appear, coedited with Sebastian Fedden, is 'The Oxford Guide to the Papuan Languages'.

He received an ARC Laureate Professorship for his project The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity, and from 2014 to 2023 directed the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL).

He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Social Sciences Academy and the British Academy, an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistics Society of America, a recipient of the Anneliese Maier Forschungspreis, and of the Ken Hale Award from the Linguistics Society of America.

"What a huge honour this is, perhaps the greatest honour in linguistics. I've had impostor syndrome many times before, but never like this, in the shadow of such giants of the field! I'm particularly honoured to be the first recipient from outside North America and Europe, and would like to thank my first teachers in the field, especially R.M.W. Dixon, Bill Foley, Tim Shopen and Anna Wierzbicka, for providing me with such an inspiring and distinctive linguistic training at the Australian National University.

"Even more importantly I want to thank all the speakers of little-known languages in remote and forgotten places, from Darwin Moodoonuthi for Kayardild, Maggie Tukumba and Manuel Pamkal for Dalabon, and Jimmy Nébni for Nen to name just a few, for the perceptiveness, patience and humour that has infused their efforts to lead me into their thought-worlds.

"Running down the list of prize winners is to follow a roll-call of those who have deeply influenced my work: Noam Chomsky whose writings first got me interested in the field, through Bill Labov who set the study of actual language in its dynamism on an empirical footing, John Lyons whose Theoretical Linguistics textbook was what first helped me see the field as a whole, Bernard Comrie as a great systematiser of language difference, Paul Kiparsky for his gifts of expounding the formal elegance of phonology, Marianne Mithun with her magical ability to light up the exuberance of linguistic possibility, Barbara Hall Partee who showed how much the formal study of logical systems in language can benefit from putting very different languages under the microscope. Everyone on the list has influenced me in profound ways.

"'Theoretical linguistics', which Neil and Saras Smith specifically mentioned as a focus of the award, means many things within different schools of linguistics. I am especially pleased that this year's award breaks down the false dichotomy between 'theory' and 'descriptive and documentary linguistics', by recognising how much the study of particular and often endangered languages, through immersive fieldwork, can contribute to the development of general linguistics.

"It is vital, if linguistics is to realise its full potential, that we move beyond conflating 'theory' with 'formalism'. We need to shift to a view more like what our biologist cousins have, namely a body of explanatory principles able to give a principled account of how the multiplicity of human languages has arisen, through a constrained set of rigorously characterised processes tested against the incredible diversity of the world's 7000+ languages by falsifiable analyses.

"Neil Smith's doctoral research was on the Nupe language of Nigeria, a language famous for its proverbs. One of them goes: Boloboloko! Ebo bo nuwonjeci a 'Running water never gets tired'. The confluence of approaches recognised by this prize is swelling a river now flowing stronger and faster than it ever, as the humanistic currents of the world's fragile linguistic heritage mingle with the increasing centrality of language in informatics.

"And let us not neglect the Saras (from Saraswati) in the award's name. Not only was Saras Smith herself, though working in medicine, an epitome of how far multilingual empathy can enrich and humanize our communications, but Saraswati, as the Goddess of knowledge, intellect, arts, wisdom, and music, reminds us how closely intertwined language is with human creativity and of understanding our place among others on this earth."

- Nick Evans

The award was established in 2013 by Professor Neil Smith, elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999 and Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London. This prize was first awarded in 2014.