In 2005 Dr. Everett shot to international prominence with a paper claiming that he had identified some peculiar features of the Pirahã language that challenged Noam Chomsky’s influential theory, first proposed in the 1950s, that human language is governed by “universal grammar,” a genetically determined capacity that imposes the same fundamental shape on all the world’s tongues.

Image Dan Everett Credit... Essential Media & Entertainment/Smithsonian Channel

The paper, published in the journal Current Anthropology, turned him into something of a popular hero but a professional lightning rod, embraced in the press as a giant killer who had felled the mighty Chomsky but denounced by some fellow linguists as a fraud, an attention seeker or worse, promoting dubious ideas about a powerless indigenous group while refusing to release his data to skeptics.

The controversy has been simmering in journals and at conferences ever since, fed by a slow trickle of findings by researchers who have followed Dr. Everett’s path down to the Amazon. In a telephone interview Dr. Everett, 60, who is the dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., insisted that he’s not trying to pick a fresh fight, let alone present himself as a rival to the man he calls “the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m a small fish in the sea,” he said, adding, “I do not put myself at Chomsky’s level.”

Still, he doesn’t shy from making big claims for “Language: The Cultural Tool,” published last week by Pantheon. “I am going beyond my work with Pirahã and systematically dismantling the evidence in favor of a language instinct,” he said. “I suspect it will be extremely controversial.”

Even some of Dr. Everett’s admirers fault him for representing himself as a lonely voice of truth against an all-powerful Chomskian orthodoxy bent on stopping his ideas dead. It’s certainly the view advanced in the documentary, “The Grammar of Happiness,” which accuses unnamed linguists of improperly influencing the Brazilian government to deny his request to return to Pirahã territory, either with the film crew or with a research team from M.I.T., led by Ted Gibson, a professor of cognitive science. (It’s scheduled to run on the Smithsonian Channel in May.)