Nicholas Evans is a typologist and anthropological linguist specialising in the languages of Australia (Kayardild, Bininj Gun-wok, Dalabon, Iwaidja) and Southern New Guinea (Nen). He has long been intrigued by the typological and analytical problems posed by polysynthetic languages, issues he has grappled with in his grammar of Bininj Gun-wok (Evans 2003), his coedited book Problems of Polysynthesis (with H-J Sasse, 2002) and his dictionary of Dalabon (Evans et al 2004). His other major contributions include work synthesising linguistic and archaeological evidence (McConvell & Evans 1997), a grammar of Kayardild (Evans 1995), a widely-translated book on the the scientific and humanistic value of endangered languages (Evans 2010), and work arguing for a linguistics built on language diversity as a foundational premise (Evans & Levinson 2009). Based at the Australian National University, he directs CoEDL, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language.
