Laura Spinney

Tag: Papua New Guinea

  • Cracking the linguistic code

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    EVERY year since 2008, with a gap for Covid-19, linguist Nicholas Evans has taken a banana boat six hours along the coast of New Guinea to reach a village called Bimadbn. There he spends the next six weeks documenting a previously unwritten language called Nen… This article first appeared in The Observer on 25 October 2025. To…

  • The linguist they can’t shut up

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    NICHOLAS Evans was wading out to a boat moored in the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia, when he felt what he thought was a baby shark nipping at his heels. The “nips” were actually bullets hitting the sea on either side of him… This article first appeared in The New World…