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.
On one of his research missions in 1993, he documented the previously undocumented Oro Win language, one of the few languages that use the rare voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate (phonetically, ).