Keren Madora Everett is an American-born linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 and Christian

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

 missionary

Missionary

A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...

.

Keren Everett has spent many years in the Amazon studying the Pirahã

Pirahã people

The Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, a subgroup of the Mura, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil's Amazonas state, in the territory on Humaitá and Manicoré municipality....

 tribe and their language

Pirahã language

Pirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....

. Her former husband Daniel Everett

Daniel Everett

Daniel Leonard Everett is a U.S. author and academic best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language....

, whom she married in 1969, is better-known as an authority on the language, but he acknowledges his ex-wife as an expert in its prosody

Prosody (linguistics)

In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...

. They lived among the Pirahã from 1978 to 1983 and from 1999 to 2002. Following their separation in 2005, Keren returned to Brazil where, as of 2007, she was continuing her missionary work among the Pirahã.

Publications

• Keren M. Everett, The acoustic correlates of stress in Piraha. Journal of Amazonian Languages vol.1 no.2, pp. 104–162. March 1998.
• Daniel L. Everett and Keren M. Everett, On the relevance of Syllable Onsets to Stress Placement. Linguistic Inquiry vol. 15, pp. 705–711. 1984.
• Keren M. Everett, Language learning as an art, as a performance. University of Pittsburgh. Summer Institute of Linguistics, 12 p. c19??.