Kélyn Salazar is a sociolinguist born in Santa Ana, El Salvador and raised in San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA and MA in Spanish from The University of Texas at San Antonio and is a doctoral candidate in Iberian Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin.

Her research explores how language ideologies shape identity, belonging, and social positioning in bilingual and multilingual contexts. With a particular focus on Salvadoran communities in Texas, her work examines language contact and racialization in Mexican-majority spaces and the ways Central Americans navigate, resist, and negotiate dominant linguistic norms.

Grounded in qualitative, community-centered approaches, her work prioritizes speakers’ own perspectives in order to better understand how language functions as both a resource and a site of inequality.

Outside of academia, she has never met a creative medium she didn’t want to try. From sculpture and clay to paper-making, painting, drawing and photography, she is happily a jack-of-all-trades—mastery TBD. She also enjoys reading, watching long-form YouTube essays, long treks, and spending time with her Schipperke, Mamba.