He specializes in corpus linguistics and language variation and change.

Davies earned a bachelor's degree with a double major in linguistics and Spanish from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1986, followed by an MA in Spanish linguistics from BYU in 1989.

He earned his Ph.D. in Iberoromance philology and linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992.

From 1992 to 2003, Davies was a professor of Spanish at Illinois State University.

He was then a professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University from 2003 until his retirement in 2020.