E Pluribus Unum?: Linguistic Intolerance in the USA
with Ana Celia Zentella
Date: Thursday, March 16, 2023
Starts at 1:30 PM
Location: COB2-295
RSVP here
For any questions please contact humanities@ucmerced.edu
About the speaker:
Ana Celia Zentella is one of the foremost researchers in what she has named “anthro-political linguistics”. She is a central figure in the study of U.S. Latin@ varieties of Spanish and English, Spanglish, and language socialization in Latin@ families, and a respected critic of the linguistic profiling facilitated by English-only laws and anti- bilingual education legislation. Her book, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York (Blackwell, 1997) won the Book Prize of the British Association of Applied Linguistics, and the Book Award of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists of the American Anthropology Association. Her edited collection, Building on Strength: Language and Literacy in Latino Families and Communities (Columbia TC Press, 2005), is a popular text in the USA and Europe. Zentella has written two books with undergraduates, one at UCSD (Multilingual San Diego: Portraits of Language Loss and Revitalization, 2008, and the other at Swarthmore College (Multilingual Philadelphia: Portraits of Language and Social Change, 2010). A major sociolinguistic study, Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity (Oxford University Press, 2011, was co-authored with Ricardo Otheguy.
Manhattan's Borough President Ruth Messinger declared October 30, 1997 "Doctor Ana Celia Zentella Day" for "her leading role in building appreciation for language diversity and respect for language rights". The Society for Linguistic Anthropology honored her with its Public Outreach & Community Service award in 2016. In 2014, she was named Public Intellectual of the Year by the Latino Studies section/LASA.
