Jonathan Rosa

Jonathan Rosa is an American sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist known for his contributions to raciolinguistics. His work explores the intersections of race and language, often through ethnographic research in secondary schools. He is an associate professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education as well as the Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In 2019, he published the book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad.

Education

Rosa graduated from Swarthmore College in 2003 with a BA in linguistics and educational studies. He attended graduate school at the University of Chicago in the field of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, receiving an MA in 2006 and a PhD in 2010.

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race In 2019, Rosa published the book Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad, which is based on ethnographic research Rosa conducted at a Chicago public school in which most of the students identified as Mexican or Puerto Rican. Rosa explores how these racial identities, in addition to a broader Latino identity, are constructed at the school through the use of language, as well as how that racialization affects the students' lives while navigating American society. He describes how societal perceptions of language skills are shaped by a raciolinguistic ideology called "languagelessness", which devalues bilingualism and assumes that Latinos are linguistically deficient in both Spanish and English. He explains the complex ways in which the students combine Spanish and English in order to express their identities while conforming to these societal pressures.

Selected works

Books

Articles

Awards 2018 Charles A. Ferguson Award for Outstanding Scholarship 2020 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Language and Linguistics, for Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race