Jane H. Hill

Hill was born Frances Jane Hassler in Berkeley, California to Gerald L. Hassler and Mildred E. Mathias on October 27, 1939.[2][3] Her family moved to Binghamton, New York during World War II, then returned to California when the war ended in the late 1940s.[3] At this time, both of her parents were on staff at UCLA: her father in the Department of Engineering and her mother as director of the botanical garden, which now bears her name (see Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden).[3]

Hill began her post-secondary education at Reed College, which she attended for two years before transferring to University of California, Berkeley.[3] She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley in 1960, then matriculated at UCLA to pursue her Ph.D.[4][3] There she studied under influential figures in anthropology and linguistics including Harry Hoijer and William Bright.[2] She met her husband, Kenneth C. Hill, in Hoijer's historical linguistics course in 1961.[3] The Hills were married in 1962 and had their first of three children the same year.[3] Jane finished her dissertation in 1966.[4][2][3] The Hills then moved to Ann Arbor, MI, where Kenneth worked in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.[3] Jane worked at Wayne State University in the Department of Anthropology from 1968 to 1983, eventually becoming head of the department.[3][4] She took a sabbatical from 1974 to 1975, as did Kenneth, and they used this time to begin work on Nahuatl.[3] In 1983, she moved to Tucson, AZ to work at the University of Arizona as a professor of Anthropology and Linguistics.[3] While at the University, Hill received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Anthropological Association.[5][3] From 1997 to 1999 she served as president of the American Anthropological Association.[5][6] Around this time, Hill also successfully championed a program at the University of Arizona that would allow for a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and linguistics, a testimony to her influence in and passion for both disciplines.[3] In 2009 she retired as Regents' Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Arizona,[5][3] but continued to work on a variety of research projects until her death.

Hill published more than 100 articles and chapters, as well as eight books,[3] spanning many sub-disciplines of both linguistics and anthropology. Her work in descriptive linguistics, especially focused on languages spoken by American indigenous people, also made important contributions to discussions of language policy and language endangerment.[5] She contributed to the fields of linguistic anthropology and socio-linguistics, researching the use of Mock Spanish and the intersections of language, culture, identity, and power.[5] Though Hill's intellectual pursuits were diverse, they all embodied her self-proclaimed commitment to linguistic and anthropological studies that have a real-world impact on people's understanding of languages and on the people that speak them.[5]

Hill's work with indigenous American languages began with her dissertation focused on the Cupeño language,[7] a member of the Uto-Aztecan language family spoken in Southern California. Hill conducted fieldwork on Cupeño in 1962 and 1963 and wrote her dissertation on Cupeño, but A Grammar of Cupeño was not published until 2005.[7] The grammar uses data elicited from Roscinda Nolasquez, the last living speaker of Cupeño, as well as field notes from other linguists that had previously studied the language.[7] After Cupeño, Hill continued to work on indigenous American languages, especially those in danger of extinction. For instance, she collaborated with Ofelia Zepeda on the Tohono O'odham language and with her husband Kenneth C. Hill on the Nahuatl/Mexicano language (see List of Publications).

In addition to describing the grammar and structure of these languages, Hill also researched their history and sociopolitical context.[5] She was initially drawn to these languages by their danger of extinction and the desire to assist in preserving them through documenting their grammar and vocabulary. Hill later expanded her work beyond descriptive linguistics to analyze sociolinguistic use of these languages, as well as the ways in which they are understood by those outside their linguistic community.[5] She raised important questions about the way those advocating for endangered languages talk about the languages and people who speak them, and how their rhetoric may "inadvertently undermine [their] goals of advocacy".[8]

Outside of indigenous languages, Hill's other works often focused on the everyday uses of language in American society. Much of this work examined the way White Americans use language to subtly retain power and control.[9] Hill's book Language, Race and White Public Space and her article "The Everyday Language of White Racism" discuss how White Americans use racial slurs, linguistic appropriation, and other rhetorical techniques to mark other ethnolinguistic groups as disordered and to imply a standard of whiteness.[9] These works, and others by Hill, investigate how language can be used to obtain social or political capital, often by preventing others from obtaining it.[5]

Hill's seminal contribution to the discussion of language and racism is her analysis of Mock Spanish, where white monolingual English speakers use preset, often grammatically incorrect Spanish phrases.[5] Examples of Mock Spanish include Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous line in the movie Terminator: "Hasta la vista, baby," which is invoked in the title of Hill's 1993 publication "Hasta la vista baby: Anglo Spanish in the American Southwest". Hill noted the disconnect between this linguistic behavior and the social climate of monolingual language policy and education and anti-immigrant sentiment. She concluded that Mock Spanish, though seemingly benign, is used to "index and reproduce deep prejudices against Mexicans and Spanish speakers".[5] Research on Mock Spanish was continued by Hill, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Rusty Barrett, and Lauren Mason Carriss. The core theory has been extended to describe Mock Asian, Mock Ebonics, and others.[5]

Hill's sociolinguistic work is not limited to English speakers, and works such as Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of Syncretic Language in Central Mexico (co-authored with husband Kenneth C. Hill) and "The voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano narrative" address similar topics in the context of Nahuatl/Mexicano.

Hill's extensive work on endangered languages, as well as her broad interests across the fields of linguistics and anthropology have elicited comparison to Franz Boas, one of the most prominent figures in linguistic anthropology.[10] In 2009, Hill was given the Franz Boas Award by the American Anthropological Association,[5] and her work was cited repeatedly in Christopher Ball's "Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011," published in American Anthropologist in 2012.[10]