Miryam Yataco

Appears in: Activists


Miryam Yataco is a Peruvian-born language rights advocate, an expert in bilingualism, and a trained sociolinguist. Her work is rooted in the idea of language rights as human rights. 

Ms. Yataco’s focuses on language policies & language exclusion and discrimination. Her new research concentrates, on epistemological decolonization and, on Indigenous language policies developing in Latin America. 

Ms. Yataco has served as an educator in Indonesia, Mexico, and New York City.  She was a faculty member for 22 years (1992- 2014) at Steinhardt’s School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University in the Multilingual and Multicultural Studies program. In 2018 she was appointed as an External Research Associate at Kawsasun Research Group within the Center for Applied Linguistics (CILA) at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru.

Recently, she has developed a digital component to her language rights activism through social media such as Facebook. She presently belongs to a network of Indigenous scholars and activists working to promote Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.