Caleb Everett

Caleb Everett is an American academic and researcher in the fields of anthropology and psychology. In 2025, he is serving as the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Delaware. He is recognized for his interdisciplinary work on linguistic relativity, numerical cognition, and the interplay between language, culture, and cognition, with significant contributions from fieldwork in Amazonia. Everett has authored influential books, including Numbers and the Making of Us and Linguistic Relativity: Evidence across Languages and Cognitive Domains (2013), and has received accolades such as the 2018 PROSE Award and 2023 PROSE Award.

Early life and education Caleb Everett is the son of linguists Daniel Everett and Keren Everett. He spent much of his childhood in the Amazon rainforest, where his parents worked as missionaries and linguists with the Pirahã people. During this time, he lived in a hut and was home-schooled by his parents while also experiencing local indigenous culture, including learning traditional skills alongside Pirahã children.

Everett earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh, followed by master's and doctoral degrees in linguistics from Rice University. His work on numerical cognition posits that numbers are a cultural invention, refined over time, as explored in Numbers and the Making of Us, based on fieldwork with indigenous Amazonian communities.

His interdisciplinary methods include computational analyses, experimental studies, and fieldwork, with recent work examining aerosol particles in speech, linking anthropology to environmental science. His publications, cited over 2,274 times, reflect his broad impact across multiple disciplines.

Publications Everett's key works include: A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think (2023) – Winner of a PROSE Award and selected as one of the top 10 science books of fall 2023 by Publishers Weekly Numbers and the Making of Us (Harvard University Press, 2017) – Explores the cultural evolution of numbers; winner of the 2018 PROSE Award and named one of the 10 best science books of the year by Smithsonian.

Awards and honors + Awards and Recognition Award/Honor Year Details PROSE Award for Best Book in Language & Linguistics 2023 For A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think