Lourdes Ortega (born 1962) is a Spanish-born American linguist.

She is currently a professor of applied linguistics at Georgetown University.

[2] She is noted for her work on second language acquisition and for recommending that syntactic complexity needs to be measured multidimensionally.

Ortega received her Master of Arts in English as a second language in 1995 and her Doctor of Philosophy in Second language acquisition in 2000 from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

[4] Ortega is noted in the field of second language acquisition for her paper entitled "Towards an Organic Approach to Investigating CAF in Instructed SLA: The Case of Complexity", published in Applied Linguistics in which she claimed along with John Norris that syntactic complexity need to be measured multidimensionally.