Ana Celia Zentella

Ana Celia Zentella is a linguist and Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies at University of California, San Diego. A leading scholar in anthro-political linguistics, she is recognized for her research on U.S. Latinu varieties of Spanish and English, Spanglish, and language socialization in Latinu families, and a respected critic of the linguistic profiling facilitated by English-only laws and anti- bilingual education legislation. Her works include Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York and the edited collection Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities. She co-authored, with Ricardo Otheguy, a major sociolinguistic study, Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania.