[2] Born in Osaka, Nishida graduated from the Kyoto University Faculty of Letters in 1951.

During his studies Ishihama Juntarō and Izui Hisanosuke had a formative impact on him.

[1] In 1994 he received the Asahi Award, and in 2005 the Kyoto Culture Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

[4] Nishida's approach, dubbed "philological linguistics" by Shōgaito Masahiro, involved the linguistic study of textual works and the integration of fieldwork on contemporary languages with philological study.

[3] In the context of this overall approach, one of his major theoretical contributions was the notion of "sonus grammae", the phonology that is implied by a script system as analytically as differentiable from the phonology of a language that uses the particular script system at a certain time and place.