Miryam Yataco is a sociolinguist, a language rights advocate and an expert in Intercultural Bilingual Education that has been teaching in the Department of Teaching and Learning - Multilingual Multicultural Studies at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development in New York University for 15 years.

She studied Sociology, but her main academic concentration is in the area of Bilingual Education having completed a 64 credit Masters Degree (1990) in that field at Steinhardt School of Culture Education and Human Development. She is presently a Ph. D. candidate in Educational Linguistics. She served for 5 years as a teaching assistant of founding father of the discipline of Sociolinguistics, Emeritus Professor Dr. Joshua Fishman. Her work is influenced by scholars (having had many of them as her direct professors) from a variety of disciplines such as Ngugi Wà Thiongo, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Robert Phillipson, Robert Stam, Pedro Noguera, Mary Louise Pratt, Gayatri Spivak, Vine Deloria, John Mohawk, Gerald Vizenor, Cornell West, Boa Ventura de Souza Santos and Bambi Schiefflin. Her initial work concentrated in colonization through education and language imposition having had a special interest in topics related to North American Indigenous Boarding Schools in the US and Canada. She is a former Frances C. Allen Fellow (1994-95) from the Newberry Library D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies and a former grantee (1994) of the American Association of University Women Education Foundation (AAUW).

Since, her work has concentrated in the study of language socialization and bilingual practices among new immigrants to the US such as Bengali and Urdu speaking youth living in NYC. Her present interest is related to the schooling experiences of indigenous children and adolescents in the Andes. She has a multilingual background and training, Ms. Yataco speaks Spanish, English, Bengali & Indonesian with native fluency and has linguistic training in other languages such as Urdu. Her research interests include revitalization of indigenous languages, politics of language, language attitudes and ideologies, digitalization practices in indigenous languages, theory of bilingualism and cognitive development, language contact phenomena, second and foreign language acquisition and learning, orality-literacy and educational planning and beyond.

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