Ana Celia Zentella

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Ana Celia Zentella (born March 7, 1940) is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She develops an "anthro-political" approach to language, studying multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and language rights in U.S. Latino communities, and she has written about Spanglish and how language reflects power.

Born in the South Bronx to a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father, Zentella grew up in a multilingual environment. She earned a B.A. in Spanish from Hunter College, an M.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Penn State, and a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (1981) with a dissertation titled "Hablamos los dos. We speak both": Growing up bilingual in el barrio. She taught at Hunter College (Black and Puerto Rican Studies) from 1970 to 2001 and later joined UC San Diego as a professor. In 1996, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger declared October 30 as "Doctor Ana Celia Zentella Day" in recognition of her work on language diversity and rights. Her 1997 book Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York was honored by the British Association for Applied Linguistics and the Association of Latina/o Anthropologists. She has received several honors, including the 2005 Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual of the Year award, recognition from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology for Public Outreach and Community Service, and in 2022 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research also looks at how language choices reveal identities among Spanish speakers in New York and at the experiences of transfronterizos—students who cross the U.S.-Mexico border daily to study—in relation to Spanglish and language stigma.