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CREATE

 

Ana Celia Zentella

Professor, Ethnic Studies
azentell@weber.ucsd.edu

Education: B.A., Spanish, Hunter College (Bronx)

M.A., Romance Languages and Literatures,
Pennsylvania State University

Ph.D., Educational Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania

Research: Ana Celia Zentella identifies herself as an anthropolitical linguist, and is a central figure in the study of U.S. Latino varieties of Spanish and English, bilingualism, Spanglish, and English-only laws. Her book, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York (Blackwell, 1997) won the 1998 Book Prize of the British Association of Applied Linguistics, and the 1999 Book Award of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists of the American Anthropology Association.

Ana Celia is an anthro-political linguist who explores the relationships among linguistic codes and the sociopolitical realities of ethnolinguistic speech communities. A primary focus is the ways in which regional, racial, and class dialects of Spanish and English in Latino and African American communities in the United States and the Caribbean alternately harden and blur individual as well as group identities, challenging traditional linguistic and cultural boundaries. Dominant language ideologies and their implications for national language policies, e.g., the "English-only" movement in the USA, and educational programs, e.g., bilingual and multicultural education, are related issues.

She is currently at work on an edited collection: Language Socialization in Latino Families, Communities, and Schools: Anthropolitical Perspectives, which will include chapters by the leading researchers on language socialization among Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, and Cubans across the USA.

 

Online Reference: "Would you like your children to
speak English and Spanish?"

 

Book: Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York
(Blackwell, 1997)