Through a lifetime of deep listening, Nicholas Evans has reshaped the global study of languages

From the language-rich shores of northern Australia and Western Arnhem Land, to the southern lowlands of Papua New Guinea, Distinguished Professor Nicholas Evans has devoted his career to listening: to stories, jokes, songs and conversations in some of the world’s most fragile languages.

This week, the British Academy recognised that commitment by awarding him the 2025 Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics, one of the discipline’s most prestigious honours. The medal is given annually by the Academy “for lifetime achievement in the scholarly study of linguistics”.

Voicing the unheard

A Distinguished Professor at the ANU School of Culture, History & Language, within the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Evans has spent over four decades working with Indigenous and minority language communities across northern Australia and New Guinea.

His pioneering research has reshaped global thinking into how languages work, how they interact, how they encode cultural knowledge, and what clues they hold to our deep human past.

For Evans, every language is a vast library – a repository of ecological and spiritual wisdom, history, and humour.

His work explores the full range of what we lose when languages fall silent, why it matters, and how we can best respond to this looming collapse of human ways of knowing.

The power of immersive fieldwork

Evans’s path to linguistics was far from linear.

After undergraduate studies in biology and psychology, he turned to language – completing his PhD at ANU in 1986 on the grammar of the Kayardild language of Bentinck Island, Queensland.

His pioneering research has reshaped global thinking into how languages work, how they interact, how they encode cultural knowledge, and what clues they hold to our deep human past.

After completing his PhD, he worked at the School of Australian Linguistics, Batchelor, NT, then the Universities of Melbourne and Cologne, before returning to the ANU in 2008.

His early work challenged long-held assumptions about Universal Grammar, showing how languages can follow radically different rules yet still meet the same human needs for expression and connection.

That work set the course for a career spent revealing the creative potential of human communication.

His subsequent research has spanned grammar, translation, and typology, but also philosophy, music, history, and art.

His book Words of Wonder: What Endangered Languages Tell Us (Wiley, 2022) has been translated into five languages, most recently into Mandarin, and remains a touchstone for linguists and language advocates worldwide.

When recognising Evans’ work, the British Academy highlighted his ability to ground theoretical linguistics in fieldwork, documenting languages such as Kayardild, Dalabon, and Nen, while developing new frameworks for understanding language contact and change.

Lively debates, remarkable people and a strong linguistics ethos

Evans credits his time as a student at ANU in the early 1980s as formative. It was a moment when Australian linguistics was transforming from a “sleepy backwater” that had turned its back on the world’s most diverse linguistic landscape into a world-leading research community.

“I was lucky to get my linguistic training at that time from many remarkable people,” he recalls, “among whom speakers of several Aboriginal languages were at least as significant as the spellbindingly brilliant teachers I had at university.”

Under the leadership of inaugural Professor of Linguistics, Bob Dixon, in the then Arts Faculty, ANU Linguistics became a hub of intellectual energy and openness.

A place that brought together scholars like Anna Wierzbicka, Bill Foley, Harold Koch, Tim Shopen, and Karl Rensch, the department’s weekly seminars “were packed with a feel of intellectual history in the making,” spilling into lively debates at the student union.

“The single most important part of the ANU linguistics ethos,” Evans reflected, “was the confidence it gave us to find our own solutions to things, without caring too much about the latest theoretical fads.”

That spirit of independence and respect for linguistic diversity has remained central to linguistics at ANU – teaching generations not just to study languages, but to listen deeply to them.

A voice for diversity

Evans’ work has made a significant impact beyond academia – interpreting for Native Title cases and cultural heritage documentation, developing writing systems for previously unwritten languages, and helping revitalise endangered languages.

His ARC Laureate Fellowship (2014–2019) and leadership of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language from (2014–2023) placed Australia at the centre of global conversations about language, cognition and culture.

Evans is currently teaching in Garrthalala, Northeastern Arnhem Land at a new ‘bush uni’ initiative aimed at bridging the path to university studies for Yolŋu Matha-speaking students. He will return to Canberra next month to continue exploring how languages shape – and are shaped – by the ways humans think, feel, and imagine.

Evans says it is a huge honour to receive the Neil and Saras Smith Medal.   

He also pays tribute to the communities and teachers who welcomed him into their linguistic worlds: “Their perceptiveness, patience and humour have infused everything I have done.”

For a scholar who has spent his life exploring the creative power of language, this recognition is more than an award.

It’s a reminder that every language reveals a unique act of human imagination, and a testament to a lifetime spent listening deeply to the many voices of our world.