Daniel Leonard Everett (born July 26, 1951) is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language.

Everett played in rock bands from the time he was 11 years old until converting to Christianity at age 17, after meeting missionaries Al and Sue Graham in San Diego, California.

"[1] Everett had some initial success learning the language, but when SIL lost their contract with the Brazilian government, he enrolled in the fall of 1978 at the University of Campinas in Brazil, under the auspices of which he could continue to study Pirahã.

His master's thesis, Aspectos da Fonologia do Pirahã, was written under the direction of Aryon Rodrigues, one of the leading experts on Amazonian languages.

Everett's 1979 Universidade Estadual de Campinas master's thesis on the sound system of Piraha, from articulatory phonetics to prosody (e.g. intonation, tone, and stress placement).

His 2005 article in Current Anthropology, entitled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã",[3] has caused a controversy in the field of linguistics.

It argues that language is, like the bow and arrow, a tool to solve a common human problem, the need to communicate efficiently and effectively.

He reiterates and supports Aristotle's claim that the mind is a blank slate and makes the case that the notion of the human self most compatible with the facts is the Buddhist concept of anātman.

[12] In 2016 Tom Wolfe published a book, The Kingdom of Speech, in which he discusses work of four major figures in the history of the sciences of evolution and language, Charles Darwin, Noam Chomsky, Alfred Wallace, and Daniel Everett.

[13] A festschrift entitled "From fieldwork to linguistic theory: A tribute to Dan Everett" was published by Ted Gibson and Moshe Poliak in 2024.