Jon Henner

Jonathan Henner (died August 14, 2023) was an American linguist, academic, and theorist.

Biography Henner was born Jonathan Henner

Scholarly work In collaboration with Octavian Robinson, Henner originated a named framework, Crip Linguistics, for understanding the intersection of language and disability. This was first published in a 2023 manifesto, and then as The Crip Linguistics Reader. The core idea in this framework is that many common ways understanding language across linguistics, speech language pathology, and education, carry ableist and audist notions that some ways of using language are good and correct and others are bad or broken. Crip Linguistics instead holds that all the ways that people use language are deserving of dignity, a stance Henner captured in an often quoted line: "How you language is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you your languaging is wrong. Your language is the story of your life." In Crip Linguistics Goes to School, Henner and Robinson argued that education systems often police the language of disabled students, forcing children to conform to normative language practices (e.g., forcing deaf children to try to learn to hear and speak) in ways that are harmful. For deaf children, they argued, rather than expecting children to conform to normative language standards, "Teachers of the deaf must have attained the fluency in all languages that their students are expected to use." Following his death, the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education dedicated a special issue to the topic. Crip Linguistics has since been taken up by scholars across disciplines, informing research on sign language linguistic theory, the language practices of deaf immigrants, and disabled young children's early literacy.

Henner published a significant amount of his academic perspectives on Twitter, where he wrote frequently about his academic work informed by "his personal experience as a Jewish gender-bending multiply disabled autistic deaf parent... and for the last six years of his life, as someone grappling with advanced melanoma, chronic pain, and illness." He was deliberate about writing about academic topics outside the cannon, and in mainstream venues as a way of "centering perspectives that aren't journal sanitized" and "including marginalized folks doing work on their languages and communities."

Selected Bibliography Books and edited volumes Robinson, Octavian; Moriarty, Erin; Henner, Jon, eds. (2025). The Crip Linguistics Reader . Gallaudet University Press.

Journal articles

Book chapters

Thesis