Leanne Hinton

Leanne Hinton is a linguist and advocate for the perpetuation and revival of Native American languages. She strongly supports interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics and linguistic research that relates to community needs and interests, as well as to theory.  Dr. Hinton has published 8 books and numerous articles on the state of indigenous languages. She co-developed a language learning technique for communities in which the only Native speakers are elderly and few in number.  Called the Master Apprentice approach, this immersion method pairs an elder, fluent speaker with a younger non-speaker, where the language is taught and learned in a culturally meaningful setting.  She also organizes the bi-annual Breath of Life Workshops at UC Berkeley, where California Indians with no living speakers of their Native languages use scholarly and other resources to reconstruct and start speaking their Native languages again.