Projects per year
Personal profile
Biography
My central focus is the diversity of human language and what this can tell us about the nature of language, culture, deep history, and the possibilities of the human mind. I am especially interested in the ongoing dialectic between primary documentation of little-known languages, and induction from these to more general questions about the nature of language. My book Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us outlines the field's engagement with the planet's dwindling linguistic diversity.
I have carried out fieldwork on several languages of Australia and Papua New Guinea, publishing grammars of Kayardild (1995) and Bininj Gun-wok (2003), and dictionaries of Kayardild (1992) and Dalabon (2004). I love fieldwork and have spent around seven years living in remote communities, learning and recording their languages, and relating this to broader issues including Native Title, vernacular literacy, and indigenous art and music. Training young scholars interested in carrying out language documentation and description, within a broad ethos of reciprocal engagement with speech communities, is a key goal of our program.
Specific current projects include the cross-linguistic SCOPIC study (co-leader: Danielle Barth) of how diverse grammars underpin social cognition, a global study of paradigm syncretisms (PARABANK – see http://glottobank.org/#parabank) and a team project on the diverse and little-studied region of Southern New Guinea, particularly Nen and other languages of the Yam family.
Two larger research projects are
(a) my ARC Laureate Project on 'The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity', which integrates typological and variationist studies across a number of small-scale multilingual speech communities in indigenous Australia, PNG and the Pacific to study whether we can detect the seeds of macro-diversity in community-level microdiversity, and
(b) CoEDL, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, whose goal is to integrate typology and descriptive linguistics, evolutionary approaches, and studies of learning and processing across a wide range of linguistic types with the aim of setting up a new approach to language that places diversity, variation and change at centre stage.
Research interests
Australian languages, Papuan languages, linguistic typology, historical and contact linguistics, semantics, the mutual influence of language and culture
Qualifications
Expertise Areas
- Studies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Society
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages
- Comparative Language Studies
- Translation and Interpretation Studies
- LINGUISTICS
- Language in Culture and Society (Sociolinguistics)
- Language in Time and Space (incl. Historical Linguistics, Dialectology)
- Linguistic Structures (incl. Grammar, Phonology, Lexicon, Semantics)
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Network (past 5 years)
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Modularised cultural heritage archives future-proofing PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) Ext-led by University of Melbourne
Barth, D., Thieberger, N. A., Bird, S., Evans, N., Harris, A., Morey, S., Palmer, B. & Simpson, J.
Australian Research Council (ARC), Australian National University (ANU)
1/07/22 → 30/06/24
Project: Research
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Modelling Pacific Creole Languages
Evans, N., Barth, D., Evans, B. & Thieberger, N. A.
Commonwealth Department of Defence, Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG)
28/02/22 → 30/06/25
Project: Research
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Language Data Commons of Australia
Haugh, M., Travis, C., Evans, N. & Simpson, J.
Australian Research Data Commons (subsidiary of NCRIS)
1/07/21 → 30/06/23
Project: Research
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Adaptation and diversification of the First Peoples of Sahul
Australian Research Council (ARC)
20/06/19 → 25/11/23
Project: Research
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Modele de Convention - Paradesic Project
Evans, N., Thieberger, N. A. & Vernaudon, J.
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs
10/05/19 → 20/12/21
Project: Research
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Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology
Passmore, S., Barth, W., Greenhill, S. J., Quinn, K., Sheard, C., Argyriou, P., Birchall, J., Bowern, C., Calladine, J., Deb, A., Diederen, A., Metsaranta, N. P., Araujo, H., Schembri, R., Hickey-Hall, J., Honkola, T., Mitchell, A., Poole, L., Racz, P. M., Roberts, S. G., & 4 others , 2023, In: PLOS ONE (Public Library of Science). 18, 5, p. 1-19Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
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The sound of one quotation mark: Quoted speech in Indigenous Australian narrative
Rumsey, A., Mansfield, J. & Evans, N., 2023, Celebrating Indigenous Voice. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald , Robert L. Bradshaw , Luca Ciucci and Pema Wangdi (ed.). 1st ed. Germany: de Gruyter, p. 33-72Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter
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Blowing in the wind: Using 'North Wind and the Sun' texts to sample phoneme inventories
Baird, L., Evans, N. & Greenhill, S., 2021, In: Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 52, 3, p. 453-494Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
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Idiomas vitales en Mexico y Australia
Evans, N., 2021, In: Ichan Tecolotl. 32, 345Research output: Contribution to journal › Article
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Kin against kin: internal co-selection and the coherence of kinship typologies
Passmore, S., Barth, W., Quinn, K., Greenhill, S., Evans, N. & Jordan, F. M., 2021, In: Biological Theory. 16, 3, p. 176-193Research output: Contribution to journal › Article