Radio & Podcast
The missionary who learned a language but lost his faith
A 40-minute interview about Everett’s early work with the Pirahã and how learning their language transformed his religious outlook.
Featured
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
Pantheon Books · 2008
The account of thirty years among the Pirahã of the Amazon — the book that brought a linguist’s fieldwork on language, culture and belief to a wide readership.
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About
Dan Everett went to the Amazon to translate the Bible. Over the next four decades he lived in the jungle for nearly eight years, discovered a language no outsider had documented, and left an atheist.
His work among the Pirahã produced the first well-documented case of a human language without recursion, and set off one of the longest-running disputes in modern linguistics.
He is Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University.
- Speaking
Homo Erectus and the Invention of Human Language
A Harvard Science Book Talk based on How Language Began, in which Everett argues that the tools, travel, and settlements of Homo erectus are best explained by the invention of language.
- Film & TV
The Grammar of Happiness
ABC Australia, Smithsonian Channel and ARTE FranceA documentary following Daniel Everett back to the Pirahã community and exploring what their language may reveal about the relationship between language and culture.
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Research
I arrived in the Amazon in October of 1977. Six weeks later I was among the Pirahãs. Since that time, over a period that ended in 2013, I lived among the Pirahãs for nearly eight years and among other Amazonian peoples for a period of one year. I began by studying sound systems and sound (phonology and phonetics), and moved on to word structure (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), and discourse studies across several languages.
“Everett has forced many researchers to reevaluate basic assumptions about the relationship among culture, language and cognition.”