[1] Blevins received her PhD in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.
[2][3] She worked as the senior research scientist at the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig from 2004-2010.
[4] Blevins's research spans several sub-disciplines and features Austronesian, Australian Aboriginal, Andamanese, Native American languages,[5] and more recently Basque.
This approach argues that many common sound patterns in contemporary phonologies are not necessarily reflections of underlying universal properties of languages, but rather the result of sound changes that are guided by the common tendencies of language transmission.
[7] In 2001, Blevins published a sketch grammar of Nhanda, based on her work with the last remaining speakers.