Leanne Hinton

Department: Linguistics

My primary research interests revolve around language death and language revitalization, and thus the politics of language. Since race is a very important issue in language politics and language death, I have frequently been involved in language issues that involve race, such as the ebonics controversy, Official English, bilingual education, and laws affecting immigrant languages and Native American languages. I have also done research on language and gender, and run classes where many of the term papers are about language and gender, language and race, or an intersection of both. I am working on a book called “The American Languages,” related to a class I teach by the same name, which will have a number of chapters on language and race and/or gender. (Read more about Professor Hinton in the Spring 2003 issue of Faultlines.)